By Jeremy Sung

ICEM’s Jeremy Sung is visiting project sites in Lao PDR, Cambodia and Vietnam as part of an ICEM study into climate change threats and vulnerabilities in provincial towns. Here, he utilizes an innovative i-phone app iGIS as a cost-effective way to achieve project objectives.

KAYSONE PHOMVIHANE, LAO PDR – 19 September 2013:  Whilst undertaking the surveys and meetings as part of the  ADB project Climate Resilience in GMS  Cities, we encountered several challenges related to bad infrastructure and climatic conditions. We also  found that current maps of the local towns are very poor and out-of-date. We realized it would be useful to tag various features of the towns using a GPS device so that we could map the key features ourselves, and hence analyse the vulnerability of key infrastructure and facilities.

Our project team only has one GPS tagging device. However, this project spans more than three towns in three different countries (Cambodia and Vietnam as well as Lao PDR). With no extra budget for equipment, the question was, how were we going to manage the demands of mapping the key infrastructure and vulnerabilities in each of our project cites?

A cost-effective answer lay in Smartphones and free software. Using our consultants’ existing Smartphones we installed the free but featured-packed iGIS software. iGIS turned our phones into a fully capable GPS tagging devices, allowing us to map and plot data points and produce shapefiles that can be used by professional GIS software packages.

Whilst visiting project sites in Kaysone Phomvihane, we plotted our location on the map using iGIS and made some short notes about our observations. Back […]

By Jeremy Sung

ICEM’s Jeremy Sung is visiting project sites in Lao PDR, Cambodia and Vietnam as part of an ICEM study into climate change threats and vulnerabilities in provincial towns. Here, he meets the Women’s League and finds out how climate change can exacerbate gender inequalities.

KAYSONE PHOMVIHANE, LAO PDR – 18 September 2013: It’s rainy season in Kaysone Phomvihane so we woke up to grey skies and constant drizzling. An early meeting with the project managers for ADB infrastructure investments was followed by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DONRE). DONRE manages meteorological and hydrological data for the town and the officials here were very interested in our climate change projections.

Our next stop was the local community hall, to meet members of the Kaysone Phomvihane Women’s Union. We talked briefly about how climate change can exacerbate existing gender inequalities. We conducted a snap poll, using a show of hands. Women representing four districts complained of insufficient access to water and at least a third of the room experienced more than five blackouts per month. We also heard that the women in particular face the challenges of poor quality roads to the markets – since it’s often the women here are who are responsible for purchasing household goods. The women also described a major storm event in March this year (2013) which caused widespread devastation.

All in all, it was a fascinating session. We are looking forward to documenting the experiences of local residents during extreme climate events over the course of the project.

It was back into the field for the afternoon. We examined a storm water canal that regularly overtopped and the northern flood gate, which, like the southern gate, was now out of order. We […]