Population displacement during disasters predicted using mobile data
Using data supplied by a mobile operator, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have shown that population movements after the 2010 Haiti earthquake followed regular patterns. This information can be used to predict beforehand the movements of people after a disaster, and thus improves chances for aid to be delivered to the right places at the right time.Every year, tens of millions of people are displaced by natural disasters, and to date knowledge of their movement patterns has been sparse. The results of the study, now published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)