New tool tracks citizens’ behaviour during haze
By GovInsider
Potential benefits for governments across the region.
Indonesia is testing a dashboard that analyses how people react to a haze crisis.
The Haze Gazer tool built by Pulse Lab Jakarta tracks real-time movement patterns and changes to citizens’ behavior when an area is hit by haze.
The dashboard also shows locations of fire and haze hotspots, haze density in populated areas, and where people are most vulnerable.
The tool combines satellite data on haze hotspots with crowdsourced data from social media, the government’s complaints system, and news outlets. It analyses trends on what affected citizens are saying online, such as on the health effects of haze, and the popular hashtags they use.
Officials can also look at haze-related images and videos to get a better picture of what is happening on the ground. These are filtered using image recognition technology and hashtags. The lab hopes this will help officials target their assistance and come up with better responses during an emergency.
“It enables Indonesia’s local (BPBD) and national (BNPB) disaster management authorities to target their interventions and to align their efforts with those of affected populations,” Pulse Lab Jakarta wrote in its blog.
Haze Gazer is being piloted by disaster management officials in Indonesia, and the lab believes it has the potential to be scaled across the region. It is also looking for more information to add to this tool, such as sensor data and government operations strategies.
If the Indonesian Government shares its disaster management practices, for instance, the dashboard could analyze whether government actions are in line with citizens’ needs.
The underlying mechanism of Haze Gazer - collecting digital data, analyzing it, and visualizing the insights - can be applied to other types of disasters, the lab added.