Bibliography on geography and access issues

Dear crisis mapping colleagues,

One area that is of frequent interest to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is that of access issues. These issues include both humanitarian access, that is to say, access on the part of humanitarian actors to populations affected by sudden-onset natural disaster or complex emergency events; and access in a more general context, on the part of civilians to basic resources necessary for their subsistence. By far the most advanced studies on the part of OCHA in this regard have been conducted by OCHA Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt). Their analysis first sub-divides these two major categories of access, and then further subdivides access on the part of civilian populations into different sectors (ie., medical services, supplies, education, land rights, etc.).

Among other analyses which have been put to use in this area are georeferencing of barriers, which includes a full documentation and monitoring of barriers throughout a territory. This allows for estimates to be made for total additional man-hours required to access different types of resources (ie., while before a small town was 10 minutes from a medical center, following the placement of a barrier the time to arrive was increased to 1 hour). These estimates can be arrived at using network analysis, but require a large volume of precisely georeferenced information regarding resources, populations and barriers.

In Colombia and many other large countries, with extremely limited presence by humanitarian actors in most of the country, information on barriers or restrictions put in place on access between population centers is sparse and occasional. This type of information, from our point of view in OCHA Colombia, can be used as a potential indicator that access problems exist, but cannot definitively identify confined communities with access issues.

Using a database on vulnerability and threat indicators, which include past confinement situations, OCHA Colombia concluded an initial stage of study on access and confinement issues in the country in 2009. Via a logit model, past occurrences between the 2004-2008 period were utilized to calculate likely future occurrences. While our work on confinement is not yet published, a past study using a wider range of variables is available to those who speak Spanish. The information utilized in the study lacks georeferencing, using information available at the level of Colombia's 1,192 municipality-level admin divisions. Some georeferenced information on threats and vulnerability is available however, and more may be available in the future. Our concern in 2010 is to incorporate a variety of this georeferenced data, some of which may be sampled, into our larger database, to give an improved spatial analysis of confinement and access risk levels in the country.

I am posting as I hope that someone may have relevant experience from other fields with which I lack familiarity. Any guidance to key bibliographic materials would be most helpful, and any comments on the work which has already been done would also be of use.

Best regards,

Jeffrey Villaveces