About

The Decentralized Damage Mapping Group (DDMG) is an international collaborative initiative focused on leveraging Earth Observation (EO) datasets to develop innovative solutions for damage assessment in conflict and disaster-affected regions.

We aim to advance scientific excellence in monitoring the environmental impacts of armed conflict, foster international collaboration across disciplines and communities, support transparency and reproducibility of conflict impact analysis using EO data, and engage with diverse user groups and stakeholders as we build a knowledge base around DDMG as a decentralized group, in that we are geographically distributed and collaborate in a non-hierarchical, flat organizational structure built around mutual trust, support, and collaboration.

Our core team comprises members with expertise in EO data processing, applications, and communication who come from a broad range of backgrounds, including academia, humanitarian NGOs, and open source journalism. Each team member brings unique expertise, contributing to an integrated approach to different types of environmental impacts of armed conflicts.

We established DDMG in 2023 to address the lack of timely data on damage to cities, farms, and forests caused by war, especially in protracted or under-reported conflicts. Having timely data on the locations, timing, and severity of damage is of utmost importance for the protection of civilians, which is a moral and legal imperative. But damage caused by war can also lead to a crisis in housing; contaminate the land, water, and atmosphere with toxic particulates; imperil delivery of aid or evacuation plans; bring extreme food insecurity; drive large-scale population displacement; inhibit post-conflict economic recovery; and challenge rebuilding efforts.

While destruction may be evident and widespread, its quantification requires a systematic EO-driven approach sensitive to particular conditions in conflict settings, such as forced displacement, the establishment of temporary shelters, a lack of physical access, and often a scarcity of information on “on the ground” conditions. DDMG meets this challenge by conducting nationwide EO-driven assessments of urban and vegetation damage with state-of-the-art change detection approaches, triangulating our findings with georeferenced social media and journalist reporting, conducting rigorous accuracy and agreement exercises, and disseminating the findings to humanitarians, journalists, and INGO actors for use in their reporting or analyses.