Capacity building for disaster management in Mozambique through teaching public participatory GIS and spatial data infrastructure

Mozambique is highly vulnerable to clime change induced hazards. The extreme weather impacts are directly related to the temperature and precipitation variations leading to more frequent and devastating events as floods, droughts and cyclones. Even though Mozambique has committed to international policies and has adopted mitigation measures, still it is lacking of sufficient capacity on various levels to lower the country’s vulnerability level. A consortium of eight partner countries, along with Mozambique, commenced a Climate Change Induced Disaster Management in Africa (CIDMA) project which aims at building education capacity through implementing geospatial information technology for improved disaster management in Mozambique. The core of the project is in developing three 10 ECTS courses that will implement state-of-the-art techniques and methodologies for dealing with climate change induced hazards. The courses are intended from one hand to university students and staff, but on the other to local authorities, organisations and companies occupied with disaster management, and local communities. As one of course, “Public Participatory GIS and Spatial Data Infrastructure in Disaster Management” is designed to prepare students to be able to produce thematic maps through GIS and crowdsourced data, as well as various EO data. With the presented course it is expected for the students to gain valuable theoretical and practical knowledge of GIS, VGI and SDI for exploiting, managing and processing geospatial data for risk mitigation and hazard mapping. Moreover, they will be skilled in using free and open-source GIS software, desktop and mobile mapping techniques, and free web-based dissemination and processing services. In addition, it is expected for the students to develop critical judgement for analysing data with the correct tools in case of climate induced disasters. This paper describes the design, structure and topics of the “Public Participatory GIS and Spatial Data Infrastructure in Disaster Management”.