Researching night lights and natural disasters: UCL student Jade Baker reflects on her internship

In summer 2024 Jade Baker, who a fourth year undergraduate student at UCL on the International Geography BA programme, worked at Save the Children UK as part of her internship with the UCL Social Data Institute.

Jade conducted research to explore the use of nightlight data to better understand the socio-economic impacts of disasters.

In her blog post for Save the Children UK Jade provides some of her thoughts on the project:

“In a warming world of increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters, it is essential to find approaches and methods that track disaster’s impacts and recovery efforts. Remote sensing data and satellite imagery are powerful tools to provide almost real-time data and is increasingly used to support disaster recovery. However, could these approaches also be used in the long-term to chart the economic recovery after the disaster over time and space? 

For my UCL Social Data Institute internship with Save the Children UK, I conducted a research project to explore the use of NTL to better understand the socio-economic impacts of disasters. Specifically, I looked at trends before and after disasters in a few selected case studies in Madagascar and Zimbabwe. To do this, I combined NASA’s black marble NTL data with the Geo-coded Disaster Dataset (GDIS) which provided the locations of disasters. Then, I ran a few preliminary plots of the NTL before and after each disaster and some statistical tests."

Read the blog post in full.

Links:
Save the Children | Nightlights and shocks: Understanding disaster recovery pathways using night light data
UCL Department of Geography