Geospatial platform for climate impact documentation and advocacy
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The Need
OXFAM needed a powerful tool to document, analyze, and communicate the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities across Bangladesh. Climate-induced loss and damage—from flooding and erosion to salinity intrusion and extreme weather events—disproportionately affects marginalized populations, yet this impact often remains invisible to policymakers and international stakeholders. OXFAM required a web-based spatial data visualization system that could document climate impacts across 100+ vulnerable regions, compile evidence from remote areas where data collection is challenging, and transform raw field data into compelling visual narratives that could influence policy and climate finance decisions.
The challenge was to create a platform supporting real-time geospatial mapping, data uploads from remote field teams using mobile tools like KoboToolbox and SurveyCTO, and interactive reporting that would empower OXFAM and stakeholders to monitor climate impacts, visualize spatial patterns, and advocate for climate justice effectively. With the need to visualize 50,000+ community data points documenting everything from household displacement to livelihood loss, OXFAM required a comprehensive climate impact tracker that could serve both as an operational monitoring tool and a powerful advocacy platform demonstrating the human cost of climate change.
The Solution
We developed a comprehensive web-based spatial data visualization system that has become a critical tool for OXFAM's climate advocacy and evidence-based action in Bangladesh.The Climate Impact Tracker provides a web platform specifically designed to map climate change-induced loss and damage using spatial data across Bangladesh. The system maintains a geospatial database of climate-vulnerable regions, documenting specific impacts including flooding extent and duration, erosion-affected areas, salinity intrusion in agricultural lands, cyclone and storm surge damage, drought impacts on livelihoods, and displacement of communities. Each impact is geocoded, enabling spatial analysis that reveals patterns—which regions face multiple overlapping climate threats, how impacts change over time, and where interventions are most urgently needed. The tracker transforms abstract climate statistics into concrete, location-specific evidence of how climate change is affecting real communities.
The Real-Time Visualization capability delivers interactive maps and dashboards offering live insights for disaster monitoring and policy action. Stakeholders can access the platform to view current climate impact data visualized on interactive maps showing the geographic distribution of impacts, layer different data types to understand relationships between climate events and community vulnerabilities, zoom into specific regions for detailed assessment, and export visualizations for reports and presentations. During climate events like floods or cyclones, the real-time visualization enables rapid damage assessment and response coordination. For policy advocacy, the interactive dashboards provide compelling visual evidence supporting OXFAM's calls for climate finance and adaptation support.The Decision Support System provides tools helping stakeholders assess climate risks and plan mitigation based on localized data.
The platform enables users to identify high-risk areas requiring immediate intervention, compare climate vulnerability across regions to prioritize resource allocation, model future scenarios based on historical impact data, and generate evidence-based recommendations for adaptation strategies. This transforms the platform from a passive data repository into an active decision support tool that guides OXFAM's program planning and policy advocacy. The Empowering Marginalized Voices component supports OXFAM's GROW Program by enabling women and youth to engage in climate policy decisions. The platform captures and visualizes data specifically documenting how climate change affects women and youth, amplifies community voices by mapping local knowledge and experiences, provides evidence that marginalized groups can use in advocacy, and supports participatory processes where communities contribute to data collection and analysis.
This ensures climate policy discussions are informed by the lived experiences of those most affected rather than just top-down expert assessments. The platform integrates open-source GIS tools, RESTful APIs, and mobile data collection tools (KoboToolbox, SurveyCTO) for seamless, scalable, and secure spatial data management. Field teams working in remote climate-vulnerable areas use mobile tools to collect geospatial data offline, which automatically uploads to the platform when connectivity is available, ensuring continuous data flow from the most affected communities. The measurable impact demonstrates the platform's reach: monitoring 100+ climate-vulnerable regions and visualizing 50,000+ community data points, providing unprecedented visibility into climate change impacts across Bangladesh.
The Challenge
The primary challenge was building a geospatial platform capable of handling diverse climate impact data types—from quantitative measurements like flood extent and crop loss to qualitative narratives about livelihood disruption and displacement—while maintaining spatial accuracy and analytical rigor. Climate impacts manifest differently across regions and communities, requiring flexible data models that could accommodate this diversity while enabling meaningful comparison and aggregation.Integrating mobile data collection tools like KoboToolbox and SurveyCTO with the geospatial platform required handling various data formats, ensuring geographic coordinates captured in the field were accurate and properly geocoded, managing offline data collection with delayed synchronization, and validating data quality from multiple field teams with varying technical capabilities.
Building robust ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines that could process incoming field data and update geospatial visualizations reliably was critical for maintaining platform utility.Creating real-time visualization dashboards that were simultaneously powerful enough for technical users conducting spatial analysis and intuitive enough for policymakers and community advocates without GIS expertise required careful UX design. The interactive maps needed sophisticated features like layer controls, filtering, and spatial queries while remaining accessible to non-technical users. Balancing analytical depth with usability presented significant design challenges.
Implementing decision support capabilities that could provide actionable insights rather than just data visualization required embedding climate risk assessment models, developing algorithms identifying high-priority intervention areas, and creating reporting templates aligned with policy advocacy needs. The system needed to bridge the gap between raw field data and the evidence-based recommendations required for policy influence.Supporting OXFAM's GROW Program by empowering marginalized voices required ensuring the platform could capture and represent community perspectives authentically, designing participation mechanisms that enabled women and youth to contribute meaningfully, and creating visualizations that conveyed the human dimension of climate impacts rather than just statistics. This required thinking beyond technical data management to consider how technology can support climate justice and inclusive advocacy.
The Partnership
Our collaboration with OXFAM was driven by a shared commitment to climate justice and evidence-based advocacy for vulnerable communities. We worked closely with their climate change, monitoring and evaluation, and community engagement teams to understand how spatial data visualization could support both operational needs and advocacy objectives.The partnership involved extensive field engagement to understand data collection workflows, connectivity constraints in remote areas, and the types of climate impact evidence most valuable for policy advocacy. We consulted with communities participating in data collection to ensure the platform would amplify rather than extract their voices, designing participation features aligned with OXFAM's community-centered approach.
We built the complete technology stack using Vue.js for the reactive frontend with interactive maps and dashboards, PHP Laravel backend with MySQL database for robust spatial data management, and integrated open-source GIS tools for geospatial processing and analysis. Our team implemented RESTful APIs connecting the platform with mobile data collection tools (KoboToolbox, SurveyCTO), ensuring seamless data flow from field to visualization. We designed the user experience to serve diverse stakeholders—from OXFAM field staff monitoring climate impacts to policymakers reviewing evidence to communities participating in advocacy. Training and documentation ensured each user group could leverage platform capabilities appropriate to their needs. The measurable success—monitoring 100+ climate-vulnerable regions and visualizing 50,000+ community data points—demonstrates how this collaborative approach created a platform that genuinely advances climate justice by making the impacts of climate change visible, actionable, and impossible to ignore in policy discussions.
The Tech Stack
We built the platform using Vue.js for the reactive frontend, PHP Laravel backend, and MySQL database, integrated with open-source GIS tools, RESTful APIs, and mobile data collection tools (KoboToolbox, SurveyCTO). Vue.js delivers interactive maps and dashboards with real-time visualization capabilities, providing responsive interfaces for exploring geospatial climate impact data. Laravel provides the robust backend framework for spatial data management, API services, user authentication, and business logic supporting the climate impact tracker and decision support features. MySQL with geospatial extensions stores climate impact data, community data points, and spatial boundaries for the 100+ vulnerable regions monitored. Open-source GIS tools including PostGIS for spatial queries, Leaflet or OpenLayers for interactive mapping, and QGIS integration for advanced spatial analysis provide the geospatial processing capabilities essential for climate impact visualization.
RESTful APIs connect the platform with KoboToolbox and SurveyCTO, enabling seamless data flow from mobile data collection in remote areas to the centralized visualization system. This architecture delivers seamless, scalable, and secure spatial data management supporting the climate impact tracker that maps loss and damage, real-time visualization offering live insights for disaster monitoring, decision support tools helping stakeholders assess climate risks, and empowering marginalized voices features supporting OXFAM's GROW Program—all working together to monitor 100+ climate-vulnerable regions and visualize 50,000+ community data points advancing climate justice in Bangladesh.
