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Exploring Gender Inequality in the Lower-Mekong Region – Creating a Sub-National Gender Inequality Index

mjdanielson

Edited by Oz Brown

How do you link gender inequality and disaster risk management? Climate change and social vulnerability? Where do you start? Those are the questions that have been needling at me for the past few months. As part of the gender cluster this summer at SEI, I have been tasked with investigating how we can use GIS tools to better understand the relationships between climate change and gender inequalities in the Mekong region. The journey to understanding the complexity of this problem has taken me to Cambodia and Vietnam, and down many rabbit holes of the internet in search of peer-reviewed literature and archived datasets.

Initially, the breadth and interconnectedness of the social causes of vulnerability were overwhelming. Every avenue that I explored lead to the realization that it is misleading to assess the impact of any one aspect of social vulnerability in isolation. For example, I began my research by investigating the impacts of extreme flooding events on school dropout rates of women and girls in Cambodia. I discovered that flooding had a high impact on dropout rates of women and girls in affected areas, but through further study it became clear that this was not the whole picture. In reality, while flooding certainly exacerbates dropout rates, it is only a possible final step in the long and difficult road that women and girls in these regions face in pursuing an education. As I dove more deeply into my research, I found the real causes were a myriad of social constructs surrounding traditional gendered attitudes towards women in the region. In rural areas, for example, very little importance is placed on female education because women are expected to take on the burden of domestic work around the home. This is especially prevalent among low-income families who will prioritize the education of sons over daughters, who can be kept home to assist with domestic chores. Other factors that contribute to the low levels of education of women in Cambodia include low parental literacy levels and lack of physical access to schools. As such, we can begin to see that when flooding events occur, the attitudes and social obstacles that women and girls face make it that much harder for them to maintain their education.

Furthermore, this web of attitudes and ideas continues to haunt females later in life because the impact of the lack of education can greatly inhibit women’s understanding of their rights to equality and protection under the law. This can make them vulnerable to repeated cycles of domestic violence and abuse. It can also make it very hard for rural women to break out of the poverty cycle by finding off-farm employment in non-exploitative trades. It can also impact an individual’s own perception of education and these attitudes may be passed on to the next generation, continuing the cycle of devaluing education for women and keeping them in positions that do not allow them to be any more influential or economically productive than the preceding generation.

This is not only the case with education but these same cycles of inequality can be identified through various social institutions such as health, income, access to resources, representation in political roles, etc. All of these indicators are often viewed as singular topics but they are undeniably interrelated and must be examined within a framework of vulnerability. The concept of social vulnerability as a collective measure of several indices is not new. The Gender Inequality Index (GII) created by the UNDP in 2010 is an index for measurement of the gender disparity in the areas of reproductive health, empowerment and labor market participation. Although the GII can give us a better understanding of gender inequality across and within nations, it does not explain the variation in inequality that exists at a sub-national or sub-regional level. As such it is of limited use in understanding where women are most vulnerable and cannot be used to target specific resources to alleviate the root causes of inequality. It is because of this gap in regional specificity that the end of my time at SEI has culminated in the proposal to create a provincial-level gender inequality index for Cambodia and Vietnam. The development of such a tool will be created in collaboration with two regional technical groups on gender and GIS – SERVIR-Mekong and SEI – alongside regional women’s organizations in the respective countries, such as the National Women’s Machinaries and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) in Cambodia, and the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU) in Vietnam. Development of a regionally specific gender-inequality index can be used as a complementary tool in the analysis of gender gaps and vulnerabilities in a region. For instance, the index could be used in tandem with climate change forecasting data, such as drought or flood, in order to assess the gendered dimensions of climate change risk.  Additionally, the publication of the index has the potential to draw attention to gender inequalities that exist across social institutions and can be used as a catalyst for action. Lastly, the hope is that this index will put pressure on agencies to collect more gender disaggregated data and with greater frequency.

 

GsAL Returns to Bangkok

mjdanielson

Written by Oz Brown

How do you sustainably manage urban growth in a way that allows you to make the most efficient use of your land and water resources? How do you account for rapid declines in forest cover and the resulting physical, ecological and human problems this can cause? Further – how do you account for declines in forest cover in a neighbouring country, for which you may not have access to accurate, up-to-date mapping data? And how do you reduce the risk of losing hard earned development gains in areas that are prone to natural disasters such as landslides or flooding? These are some of the problems that current land-use planners and decision makers face in a world of rapid change and shifting climates; problems in the Lower Mekong Region that are being tackled in a wide collaboration to produce a dynamic new mapping tool that provides greater detail and accuracy of data.

From the 1st to the 3rd of August 2017, SERVIR Mekong in collaboration the University of San Francisco’s Geospatial Analysis Lab (GsAL), the US Forest Service and SilvaCarbon held the fourth in a series of conferences to launch their Regional Land Cover Monitoring System (RLCMS). This is an innovative tool designed to produce high-quality land cover maps that will allow decision makers in the Lower Mekong region – from national governments to local community groups, non-profits and the private sector – to make informed policy and planning decisions about resource allocation, disaster preparedness, climate change resilience, ecological conservation, carbon accounting and a whole host of other critical issues affecting these societies. The conference was led by David Saah, the director of GsAL, who has been working closely with the GsAL lab manager, Megan Danielson, on developing the RLCMS since its conception.

Over the last two years the SERVIR-Mekong and GsAL teams have been working closely with stakeholders across the Lower Mekong region (Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia) and Indonesia to identify local, regional and national needs, to develop a consistent regional classification scheme, to collect and employ on-the-ground reference data, develop algorithms for identification of land-cover classes and implement plans for how the RLCMS will be used.  One of the most encouraging and affirming aspects of the process is that representatives from groups in all of these countries (e.g. government reps, non-profits and local interests) have come together to develop and learn to use a tool that crosses political boundaries and provides better opportunities for the citizens, environments and industries of the Lower Mekong region to interact and prosper in more sustainable ways.

Since the late 90s there has been a drive in the environmental sciences community to produce global land cover mapping data and a number of detailed and invaluable maps have been created, such as the European Space Agency’s GlobCover Land Cover V2, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s  Global Land Cover-SHARE and the Natinoal Geomatics Center of China’s GlobeLand30. Traditionally, regional actors have used such efforts to extract what information they can for their own varied uses, but this method has its limitations. Existing maps are infrequently updated, the classification systems they use can be inconsistent, the actual classes they identify can be inadequate (i.e. they do not provide accurate representation of the range of biophysical layers present in a given area), they may not meet accuracy assessment requirements and some need significant data storage and processing power to run. The RLCMS, on the other hand, harnesses the processing power of Google Earth Engine (GEE) to enable the this kind of analysis to be performed on a standard computer and combines its staggering quantity of satellite imagery and data with local field research by stakeholders to provide functionality, speed and accuracy. Biophysical layers are mapped by training statistical models and machine learning algorithms on reference data obtained from said field research or existing legacy data-sets. Thanks to the input of regional stakeholders since the beginning of the process the tool uses a consistent classification scheme to describe a broad range of layers appropriate to the diverse ecology of the Lower Mekong region which can be customized and expanded as required by the user, creating high quality land cover maps that are regularly updated.

Many of the national priorities for the countries comprising the Lower Mekong region with regards to the RLCMS are similar – to simply improve the quality of their own nation’s land cover maps, to help meet targets for carbon capture and emissions and to build capacity to meet their development needs. However, many other uses for the RLCMS have been identified which reflect the different needs of these countries and organisations working within them. Laos requires improved forest mapping data and accuracy; the Mekong River Commission, an inter-governmental organisation representing the water needs of Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, will use it as an additional input into their flood monitoring systems; Indonesia has suffered from peat fires for decades and famously had an extreme crisis event in the 2015 fire season when 2.6 million hectares of land were burned, tripling their annual carbon emissions – so there is a significant need to be able to accurately define the areas affected, complete analysis of land cover changes over time and incorporate the new data they retrieve into existing methodology to prepare for and reduce the negative effects of those fires.

A tremendous amount of work has been poured into the collaboration to develop the RLCMS over the last three years and there are significant steps still to take – chiefly, using reference data to input land cover classes in the stakeholders’ respective areas of interest. However, many key obstacles have been already overcome and it is clear that this tool will afford users greatly improved prospects for informed decision making and positive change. In producing and developing the RLCMS, SERVIR-Mekong, GsAL, the US Forest Service, SilvaCarbon and the regional stakeholders involved are setting the groundwork for a comprehensive and reliable data mapping tool that has dizzying application potential.

 

 

 

 

GsAL Research Assistant Receives Award for “Excellence in Academic Research”

mjdanielson

On Monday April 24th, 2017 the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) at USF hosted Graduate Student Academic Showcase to highlight graduate students’ research and other work. This is a unique graduate student event that aims to highlight and showcase the diverse array of academic and scholarly works for graduate students from all of the academic schools and colleges at USF.

During this event, GsAL research assistant, Radhika Bhargava, received the Excellence in Academic Research award for her involvement in a project designed to build the capacity to monitor land use and land cover changes in the Lower Mekong region. The project is based on a geospatial needs assessment conducted by SERVIR-Mekong in 2015 for the Lower Mekong countries which included individual country consultations. The assessment revealed that many countries were dependent on land cover and land use maps for land resource planning, quantifying ecosystem services including resilience to climate change, biodiversity conservation, and other critical social issues. Many of the Lower Mekong countries have developed national-scale land cover maps derived in part from remote sensing products and geospatial technologies. However, updates are infrequent and classification systems and accuracy assessment do not always meet the needs of key user groups. In addition, data products stop at political boundaries and are often not accessible. Many of the Lower Mekong countries rely on global land cover products to fill the gaps of their national efforts, compromising consistency between data and policies. These gaps in national efforts can be filled by a flexible regional land cover monitoring system that is co-developed by regional partners with the specific intention of meeting national trans-boundary needs, for example including consistent forest definitions in trans-boundary watersheds. During this assessment, regional stakeholders identified a need for a land cover monitoring system that will produce frequent, high quality land cover maps using a consistent regional classification scheme that is compatible with national requirements.

This system is dependent on a sustainable source of field data that insures data quality and improves potential impact. Based on this need, collaborative workshops were held to create a robust regional reference data system that integrates results from field data, national inventories and high resolution imagery to meet the end user needs. The results presented here highlight the value of collaboratively developed systems that use data convergence to improve land cover mapping results for multiple end users.

CONGRATULATIONS RADHIKA!