Vanuatu · Port Vila · See the Vanuatu profile · See the Port Vila profile
Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 47% 60/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice
Vanuatu's Bureau of Statistics combines satellite imagery, open-source R pipelines and machine learning to estimate disaster damage and needs down to the Area Council level, giving one of the world's most disaster-exposed nations a shared, government-run forecasting platform.
Vanuatu, one of the world's most disaster-exposed countries, launched a national platform in February 2026 that uses machine learning and satellite imagery to estimate the impact of cyclones, volcanic activity, earthquakes, flooding and coastal erosion before ground assessments are complete. It is run by the Vanuatu Bureau of Statistics together with the Ministry of Climate Change.
At its core are Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAPs) — open-source workflows built in R — that combine historical disaster and administrative data with satellite feeds from Digital Earth Pacific, a regional Earth-observation system developed by the Pacific Community (SPC). The pipelines are designed to generate damage, loss and resource-need estimates down to the Area Council level. Technical and financial support came from SPC, the World Bank and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Because the platform only became operational in February 2026, no cyclone-response or damage-estimate accuracy figures have yet been published; its value so far is a working, government-owned pipeline built entirely on open-source tools to keep the capability local rather than dependent on a foreign vendor.
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