In recent years, the Government of Kerala has invested significantly in data , recognizing it as a critical resource that will advance policy decisions and effect efficient resource-sharing and building amongst the government, businesses and communities.
Currently, there are several platforms that host these open data:
- Open Government Data Portal of Kerala : intended for use by Departments and Organizations of Government of Kerala to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use.
- Map Kerala : an Open Data Kerala initiative that hosts downloadable geospatial information for Kerala districts.
- Kerala State Spatial Data Infrastructure (KSDI): an Internet based Geo-spatial Data Directory for the state that facilitates users of the system to share and explore data related to political and administrative boundaries, natural resources, transportation and infrastructure, demography, agro and socio economy etc., of the state.
The team built several demos to illustrate use cases with open data that industry practitioners and governments can use as part of evidence based policymaking.
Using Open Data retrieved from public platforms, the team studied the impact of heatwaves and air quality in Kerala, specifically in Kochi (also known as Cochin) and Trivandrum (also known as Thiruvananthapuram).
Air pollution is one of the greatest environmental risk to health, contributing to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and premature death. Heatwaves, on the other hand, impact human health through heat-related illnesses such as heatstroke, dehydration and heat exhaustion. In addition to health impacts, air pollution and heatwaves can lead to droughts, wildfires, displacement and migration, having environmental, economic and social impacts as well. Tracking heatwaves and air pollution levels can help governments and policy makers make informed policies and decisions to improve public and environmental health.
Data Scientists, Public Health Officials, Emergency Responders, Policy Makers, Urban Planners and Local Government Officials, Environment Scientists and Researchers, General Public.
The analysis will be presented in the form a Data Good that can replicated and reused in other geographic contexts as well. More about data goods here.
This work is a demonstration of what we could do with currently available open access data. In the forthcoming versions, it can be expanded in multiple ways.
Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect has known to be the reason for the increased vulnerability of cities to heat risk {cite}doi:10.1596/40771. Studying the effect of UHI is critical in mitigation and adaptation to heat risk especially in India, which is considered to be highly vulnerable to it. To this end, the team proposes supplimenting the sample Land Surface Temperature Analysis with a few components -
Component 1: Citizen Science Heat Data Collection Campaigns: Measuring accurate indoor and outdoor temperature can help understand the difference in temperature across schools and hospitals allowing policymakers to take necessary interventions to mitigate impacts. This will also allow for an accurate climate map of the entire city which can become the basis for modelling scenarios under varying climate pathways.
Component 2: Overlaying heat risk with existing sociodemographic information to determine the people and infrastructure most impacted by rising temperatures. This will allow for adaptation interventions to be put in place for neighbrohoods that are worse impacted.
Component 3: Supplimenting data from satellite imagery and remote sensing: The existing analysis from LANDSAt will be supplimented with additional data from Copernicus ERA5, and any other temperature data available through the Indian Space Research Organization. Although satellite imagery is not the most accurate representation of reality, it is a dataset that is easily available, highly granular and can be updated at a high frequency. This makes the data useful once initial calibration is conducted using data obtained through citizen science campaigns.
Ambient air pollution poses considerable health risk. Additionally, with rising temperature, citizens would have co-exposure to both heatwaves and high pollution which results in increased risk of morbidity {cite}rahman2022effects. Future work can explore different machine-learning models and compare accuracy across models.
Understanding how populations use urban space is critical for assessing economic activity, societal resilience, and infrastructure accessibility. However, measuring urban space usage at the frequency and granularity required to support these assessments can be challenging, especially when relying only on traditional survey methods. To overcome this challenge, the team proposes using mobility data -- i.e., telemetry data derived from mobile devices – to generate high-frequency indices of urban space usage (e.g., retail centers, construction sites, manufacturing zones, financial centers, residential areas, etc.). This data can be used to deisgn two components -
Component 1: Methodological Research to Measure Urban Space Usage: The team will develop a methodology for processing and analyzing mobility data to generate urban space activity level indicators, or “index”. The output will be a detailed methodological guide that can be replicated in varied contexts and a suite of interactive visualizations that communicate mobility patterns and their correlations with economic indicators. The index will support informed urban planning and design decisions, particularly in relation to climate resilience.
Component 2: Urban Climate Shock Response Analysis: The team will employ the methodologies and tools developed in the first part, using the Kerala as a case study, to answer research questions around climate-driven shifts in urban space usage, regional comparison of these shifts, correlation between urban space usage and climate shocks, and predictive analysis of future impacts. The research, disseminated in the form of a policy research working paper, will support policy and planning decisions related to urban climate resilience in Kerala. The climate shocks can include floods and heatwaves.
A sample of a similar analysis can be found in the team's work for Turkiye Earthquake response.
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This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License - see the LICENSE file for details.