ECDS

Bangladesh being one of the most disastrous and vulnerable countries due to climate change experiences countless damage and loss of human lives, property, infrastructures etc. each year but continues to move steadily toward the attainment of sustainable development goals (SDGs). Having set an objective to generate environment, natural resources, bio-diversity, climate change and disaster-related statistics for institutionalization of the environmental statistics in Bangladesh, the “Environment, Climate Change & Disaster Statistics (ECDS) Cell” under Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) intends to develop a web platform with an integration of all the relevant spatial and non-spatial data and statistics. Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) is responsible for developing this web application in use of advanced tools and techniques. The application is aimed to serve as one stop service and support early career researchers, professionals and policy makers with knowledge. Geospatial data preparation and web application development- are the two major components of this project. Geospatial data integration considers data collection, processing, validation and integration under six themes - administrative, environment and natural resources, climate and climate change, hazard and natural disaster, ecosystem and biodiversity, demographic and socio-economic. Web application development process accommodates ASP .NET Core for front end design, MySQL for database management and Leaflet JS for map representation. The overall process is based on two approaches- end user requirement assessment and collaborative development approach. Theme-based data synchronization in the web interface is intended to facilitate the end-users for data query, and the platform provides security, publicly accessible open-source code, high performance and flexibility for the users. The working package is expected to introduce a smart phone application in both iOS and Android version which will perform similar to the native application.
The data inventory and technical specifications were presented during the consultation meeting and inception workshop, and later were updated considering all the suggestions and feedbacks from experts. The ongoing key activities focus on data processing and web application development parallelly. Web features such as analysis tools, dashboard, map viewer etc. and data layers such as poverty, vulnerability index etc. have been incorporated so far in the web application, and the upgradation is still in process to make the application fully functional with all the necessary data and information so that the purpose is served successfully.