Overview:
- Humanitarian and development organizations face mounting barriers to assessing needs. Traditional data collection methods are often insufficient in fast-moving and chronically insecure contexts. Nighttime Light Reflectance (NLR) data gathered by satellites, which is freely and publicly available, has become a broadly accepted proxy for economic and other human activity, has been used in studies on natural disasters, human settlements (including refugee camps), and energy production, among other topics.
- This paper outlines how the NLR can and has been applied to answering questions and filling data gaps by aid actors, highlighting research conducted by Mercy Corps across several countries. The paper is intended to serve as a primer on NLR analysis and as a “menu” of potential NLR applications for aid actors, with the goal of providing a means to continue to make evidence-driven decisions in contexts where data is scarce, variable in quality, or inconsistent in geographic or temporal coverage.
- Specific to Lebanon, this paper reviews the LCAT’s Economic Vulnerability Score (EVS), which is municipality (cadaster) level vulnerability indicator that is composed of two NLR statistics: the minimum correlation between diesel price and NLR growth rates since the May 2021 fuel crisis, and the change in the variation of NLR within the municipality. The LCAT also used NLR to initially measure the level of damage to populated places in southern Lebanon during the ongoing conflict internally for Mercy Corps, but has been superseded by LCAT’s upcoming, more granular building damage dataset for each southern qadaa.
By Crisis Analytics Team, Mercy Corps Lebanon
