The vision
“To this day I maintain that if we’d had a proper map of Haiti from the start, we could’ve stopped cholera dead.”
— Ivan Gayton, a staff member at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
The spotlight
How well do you know your way around your neighborhood? Your city or town? The area beyond that? If you’re like me, you probably rely heavily on Google Maps or a similar app to find your way, even to destinations that are relatively close by. (If you’re like my dad, you might complain that these apps prevent people from really learning their way around a place.) But detailed, up-to-date maps don’t just serve us in our day-to-day navigational needs. They also ensure that first responders will be able to find their way to us, in the event of an emergency.
Not all regions enjoy the same level of thorough mapping — and as climate change brings ever greater threats, especially to the poorest and most remote parts of the world, people who live in uncharted areas may be at greater risk of not getting help in an emergency. Freelance writer Maddy Crowell explored this issue in a feature story for Grist last week.
“This is actually quite a serious problem for people who aren’t well mapped, because as these disasters start to strike more and more frequently, it can harm communities if they don’t have proper access to aid workers and rescue workers,” she said.
Crowell traveled to St. Lucia, a small island nation in the Caribbean, to learn more about how some communities are preparing for future disasters by contributing to digital maps of their surroundings, through a global initiative known as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.
OpenStreetMap is a free, crowdsourced, digital map of the world. It’s fueled by public satellite data, and any volunteer can go online and help make sense of the imagery in any part of the world. “You’ll have some guy in Turkey mapping out some part of rural Sudan,” Crowell said, doing work like outlining the contours of buildings and roads to translate the satellite images into mappable features. Of course, she added, it helps if you’re mapping your own community, or a place you know well. “If you look up your town or city or neighborhood and check the accuracy — the idea is that if everyone did that, then we would have a completely up-to-date, living, breathing, accurate map of the world,” she said. Although, that would require an awfully high level of participation. “It takes the world to map to map the world.”
Instead, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is recruiting local volunteers in unmapped areas to go out on foot and identify homes, businesses, roads, and other infrastructure that would be useful to first responders. In St. Lucia, Crowell joined up with a group of local women who have been at the forefront of the effort, hoping to map every bit of the 238-square-mile island.
For them, these types of maps are antithetical to how they navigate on a day-to-day basis. They orient themselves based on landmarks and don’t use street addresses or two-dimensional maps to get around. In fact, Western Cartesian maps carry a legacy of colonialism for the island nation and other places like it. Crowell told me that In St. Lucia, she visited a government department where this legacy was on full display. “They had all these maps from the 1800s — the oldest maps I’ve ever seen and got to touch in my life. But these were maps that the British and the French had created” during a period of colonial rivalry on the island, she said. “And it was explicitly racist. The map divided by color the Black areas of Saint Lucia versus the colonial white areas.”
Crowell took pains to point out that there’s nothing wrong or lesser about using non-Western mapping and navigational approaches. The problem comes when a disaster strikes and aid workers, often from other countries, need to know where people are and quickly be able to find their way to them.
“If you’re talking in terms of saving lives,” Crowell said, “We do need a better system.”
In today’s newsletter, we’re sharing an excerpt of Crowell’s piece about the work of the volunteers in St. Lucia, and why they’re motivated to put their communities on the map. Read the full story on the Grist site, here.
— Claire Elise Thompson
Mapping the Unmapped (Excerpt)
The sun had climbed high and grown unwaveringly intense as the women set off on their expedition of Gros Islet. From where I stood, studying Google Maps on my phone, I realized we were entering what felt like a modern version of terra incognita. Satellite imagery captured the basic contours of the village with all its streets and silhouettes of buildings, but few businesses or roads were labeled accurately. Alleyways and roads were missing. Buildings that lay in ruins still stood according to Google Maps.
I followed my mapping group toward an empty road. A few chickens broke into a trot in front of us. I was already disoriented: Without street names or addresses, it was difficult to find our place on the map. We reached an intersection where a grand stucco church with gilded windows stood before us. A few women in the group already knew it as St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church, which they used as a landmark to orient us on the map. Then, Weeks spotted a green street sign, likely leftover from a century of British and French colonial rule, its white lettering all but faded by the sun. It wasn’t until we were a few feet away that we could make out the faint word “Marina.” Weeks pinpointed the narrow lane on the map on her clipboard and labeled it. We took a left, down a street named Church, toward the shoreline.
Weeks was 24 when she discovered the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s cartography through a charity at her church. In 2021, she joined a field-mapping trip in St. Lucia’s southernmost city, Vieux Fort. With a small group, Weeks went door-to-door to record houses, street names, and businesses. Afterward, everyone went to a school computer lab to add their findings to OpenStreetMap. When Weeks pulled up the map of St. Lucia, she was stunned. She’d used Google Maps before, mostly to check traffic patterns, but had never seen her island from above. She spent hours correcting mistakes. Weeks was hooked. “It’s so addictive!” she told me as we stood at an abandoned bar near the water, surveying where we were. In the past two weeks alone, she’d made 5,584 edits, clicking away online, filling in the contours of buildings as seen from above.
We rounded another corner, passing a row of single-story wood homes, each no larger than a few hundred square feet. The stillness of the village felt deafening. We passed many abandoned houses and empty lots, which the women labeled “R” for ruins on their maps. But many places were still very alive, painted bubble-gum pink and lime green, azure blue and canary yellow. On the side of one bar, someone had painted a mural of a man gazing through binoculars with the words “Stay curious.” Near the shore, Weeks stopped in the middle of the road, furrowing her brow at her clipboard as she tried to position herself. A woman in a fitted, tan beach dress picking at a box of plantains and salted fish looked up at her. “Are you lost?” she asked.
Weeks nodded. “We are just mapping out the village. Is this a bar?” she asked, pointing at a two-story building with shuttered windows and a sign that read “Whispering Lionz.” The woman clapped her hands together excitedly. “It’s my new bar!” she replied. “We’re opening in two weeks.” Weeks noted the name on her map, while the woman helped identify the rest of the bars lining the street. She’d never used a map to orient herself in the neighborhood before.
All was still and quiet, the Caribbean Sea gently lapping the shore of Rodney Bay, the November sun burning intensely down, casting shadows onto the road in front of us. Stray dogs napped in the underbrush of leafy banana trees. It hardly seemed like the sort of place where a perilous, life-threatening storm could strike with little warning. But that was exactly the point of the mapping project: being prepared for the inevitable disasters long before they hit. The ability to identify who lived where could help apportion resources to poorer areas like Gros Islet. In times of acute crisis, the goal was for rescue teams to use the map to find people.
Like many residents of many island nations, St. Lucians live on the front lines of climate change. They are surrounded by turquoise waters that are slowly rising. Dense rainforest is prone to wildfires. Warming seas feed devastating hurricanes. Acidification threatens the marine habitat. Despite having some of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions in the world, small island nations are paying the highest price for the warming planet. “The problem is the governments of the developed countries, they still believe that there’s time or that this is not as serious as we make it out to be,” said Dr. James Fletcher, St. Lucia’s former minister of public service, sustainable development, energy, science, and technology. “I don’t think they appreciate just how much of a life-or-death threat it is for us. I think this whole question of mapping is a very important one: How do we use empirical data to determine which are the most vulnerable communities?”
In 2013, an unexpected storm struck St. Lucia on Christmas Eve — a time typically in the dry season. The “Christmas trough,” as locals now call it, shredded roads, destroyed houses, and flooded low-lying areas. Rescue workers found it nearly impossible to know where to go, or how to find people. Five people died. The disaster made the government and first responders realize that their Achilles heel lay in not being able to locate communities that were off the grid. “A lot of the communities might have an official route to reach them, and then when you go, it might be covered or doesn’t exist,” Marcia Haywood, the regional coordinator of Caritas Antilles, a nongovernmental organization focused on poverty and disaster relief, told me. “I want to see a map of St. Lucia that is a living, breathing document.”
— Maddy Crowell
Read Crowell’s full story, Mapping the Unmapped, here.
More exposure
- Read: about a project led by a group of women in India creating “dream maps” to show government officials what their villages should look like, with protected lands and replenished resources (Euronews)
- Read: about how Pacific Islanders are reviving traditional canoeing and navigational practices as a means of adapting to climate change (Grist)
- Read: a previous newsletter exploring climate solutions led by Pacific communities — including a mapping project by Indigenous Marind people in West Papua
- Explore: an interactive map, created by a researcher at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, that shows the projected climate future for a city or town — by comparing it to another nearby city that it might resemble in 60 years
A parting shot
In the information age, maps are often used not only as a tool to help us find our way around, but a resource to help us learn about things happening in our communities. If you want to explore even more digital maps, check out Grist’s interactive map of the United States showing where investments from the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law were promised. Some of these projects were completed, some are now facing funding cuts or pauses, and some are in limbo. What do you see in your area?
