Ecologies of Harm
Mapping Contexts of Vulnerability in the Time of COVID-19
Creating a collaborative spatial archive to document locally defined conditions of vulnerability in order to generate opportunities for knowledge-sharing, dialogues, and solutions-based engagements.
Looking Beyond the Numbers
Many are by now familiar with the John Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard, shown on the right, a powerful visual illustration of COVID-19 cases and deaths across the globe. This dashboard is typical of how most of us interact with information about COVID-19, through quantitative representations of harm. While critically important, consistent exposure to such statistics can create what researcher Paul Slovic calls “psychic numbing”, an emotional disconnect that impacts our actions and decision making (see NPR story below).
Our project, Ecologies of Harm: Mapping Contexts of Vulnerability in the Time of COVID-19, acts as a complement to statistical renderings of COVID-19, encouraging us to reflect on the lives beneath the numbers. In line with principles of counter-mapping, our research illustrates how harms caused by the pandemic intersect with other injustices and with specific geographies to exacerbate vulnerabilities of marginalized populations.
We are part of a research collaboration — with Project Lead Dr. Leslie Robertson, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology — which emerged in response to the pandemic in March 2020, to collect spatial narratives of vulnerability related to overlapping harms exposed by COVID-19.
We used Esri’s ArcGIS Web AppBuilder and Survey123 to create an interactive online interface for mapping and examining narrative information submitted by witnesses across the world, adapting tools typically used for analysis of quantitative data to highlight patterns emerging from qualitative information.
Project Design
We used Esri's Web AppBuilder to build a public-facing map plotting observations and input from researchers and witnesses around the world. Information is submitted through a browser-based survey of nineteen questions created in Survey123 Connect. The interactive map, which opens to a bird’s eye view of every continent, dotted with points representing survey responses, is seen below.
Ecologies of Harm: Mapping Contexts of Vulnerability in the Time of COVID-19
Survey123 Connect
We created a highly customized survey comprising questions eliciting text responses, multiple choice selections, and a map of the world where respondents could plot their location. Survey123 creates a hosted feature layer of the survey responses in ArcGIS Online, and the location information is used to plot point locations of survey responses on a global map. When a new survey is submitted, the map you see above is automatically updated. Because we are interested in how the pandemic changes in relation to time and space, we enabled time settings on the hosted feature layer in order to view these submissions over time via the Time widget.
Using the Arcade language to create our own expressions, we configured customized pop-ups for the survey responses in a web map in ArcGIS Online. Some of the pop-ups contain images or links to websites. We used this web map to create a web application using the Web AppBuilder.
Widgets
Although our research project collects primarily qualitative data, we were able to configure a number of widgets to allow map users to interact with the survey responses in multiple ways. In addition to standard navigation widgets enabling the user to change the extent, zoom in and out, and go to the user’s location, we also added widgets with more functionality. For example, the user is able to turn layers on and off, change the basemap, add data to the map, download survey responses, print, and measure distances and areas.
The Query widget enables users to filter, select, and download features which intersect with a user-defined shape on the map. Users can also view summaries of survey results via a link, which include word clouds, column charts, and photos submitted by respondents. The Time Slider widget interactively shows a chronology of survey submissions from April 2020 to the present. We also included the Share widget to provide an easy way for the map user to generate a short URL to share the Web App with others and an HTML iframe tag to embed the Web App on a website.
One of the most powerful widgets is the Filter widget, which we configured to enable users to filter data by twelve overlapping harms exacerbated by the pandemic, such as armed conflict, loss of subsistence, and gender violence, among others. In the example on the left, filtering by five overlapping harms, we are shown the corresponding locations in the world where researchers and witnesses have identified the presence of these harms intersected with vulnerabilities associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
We know from the Filter widget that armed conflict is reported as an overlapping harm in five different locations spanning four continents, while gender violence is pervasive across all continents.
Harms are summarized using the Chart widget, which generates pie and graph charts of overlapping harms across all, or a selection of, the locations on the map. This widget reveals that across all entries, the greatest markers of intersecting harms due to the pandemic are stigmatization and loss of subsistence.
The Information Summary widget offers a way for the user to view the main narrative summarizing harms, with the ability to click on the text to generate a pop-up for that entry at the corresponding location on the map. This widget enabled us to present and highlight the important narrative information that is at the core of our research project.
Insights
With contributions from fourteen countries and six continents, this project has mobilized knowledge about vulnerabilities ranging from lack of access to adequate housing and sanitation among residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, to overcrowding and lack of mobility among refugees in a camp in Chios, Greece. The narratives collected also highlight positive solidarities which have formed during the pandemic, such as the creation of local fishing cooperatives in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Esri’s suite of tools, from Survey123 to the customizable functions within web maps and Web AppBuilder, are typically used for collecting and analyzing highly structured, quantitative geographic data. We effectively adapted these tools to compile and visualize qualitative data about the complexities of intersecting inequities exposed and made worse by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. ArcGIS Online provided a collaborative platform for multiple people within our network of field-based partners to work on different products at the same time, and we were able to take advantage of sophisticated tools like Arcade expressions and the various functionalities with Web AppBuilder to facilitate the sharing and analysis of important and timely narrative-based information.
Extreme Weather Events
COVID-19 presents the potential for people and groups who are already 'vulnerable' to become exposed to harm in new ways. Due to the multiple and intersecting ways people are increasingly impacted by and experience harm as a result of accelerated changes in the climate, we became interested in collecting stories about extreme weather events people are experiencing around the world. We are concerned about the overlapping ways in which these harms may be occurring, and we’ve designed a survey for descriptions of extreme weather events and experiences that are affecting people across the world as we also experience the pandemic.
July Mountan wildfire burning along the Coquihalla Highway south of Merritt, B.C., August 11, 2021. Photo credit: Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press.
The events over the last year in the Lower Mainland of B.C. are a stark reminder of the way extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense and also how each occurence sets in motion a cascading sequence of vulnerabilities, all of which are exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic.
Fraser Valley near Abbotsford, November 15, 2021. Photo credit: Ben Nelms.
Over a period of five months, record-breaking heat, wildfires, and rainfall have affected some of the same communities and geographic areas across British Columbia, resulting in deaths, evacuations, homes and towns lost, marine life mass die-offs, people displaced, flooding, stranded passengers, towns cut off from supplies, and signficant damage to road, rail, and drinking water infrastructure, among other things.
BC Highway 1 at Tank Hill near Lytton and Nicomen, November 15, 2021. Photo credit: BC Transportation.
Grocery store in Kelowna, November 17, 2021. Photo credit: Bridget Chase.
Within two days of the closure of Highway 1 due to extensive road damage, grocery shelves in Kamloops, BC are nearly empty. Thousands of people are stranded in Hope, BC, where there are also concerns about supply chain issues.
It is these tangled and overlapping areas of exposure that this project hopes to bring to the forefront.
Filtering by ecologies of harm and extreme weather events
Although we just made the extreme weather events survey public and have very few submissions so far, we were able to design the survey in such a way that we could configure the widgets in the web app to analyze different data in the same way.
The image on the right illustrates filtering using results from both surveys. The image below demonstrates being able to view a chart summarizing either overlapping harms identified via the first Public Survey on Ecologies of Harm or extreme weather events identitifed via the latest survey just incorporated.
Charts can be generated either for overlapping harms or extreme weather events
Contribute
This is an ongoing research project, and we welcome your contributions. Please read more about the project at our blog and email us at Anth.CovidVulnerabilityMap@ubc.ca to contact the Project Team with questions or to receive a Project Invitation.
