Mobile Phone Location Data for Disasters: A Review from Natural Hazards and Epidemics (preprint)

Rapid urbanization and climate change trends are intertwined with complex interactions of various social, economic, and political factors. The increased trends of disaster risks have recently caused numerous events, ranging from unprecedented category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean to the COVID-19 pandemic. While regions around the world face urgent demands to prepare for, respond to, and to recover from such disasters, large-scale location data collected from mobile phone devices have opened up novel approaches to tackle these challenges. Mobile phone location data have enabled us to observe, estimate, and model human mobility dynamics at an unprecedented spatio-temporal granularity and scale. The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the use of mobile phone location data for pandemic and disaster response. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive review that synthesizes the last decade of work leveraging mobile phone location data and case studies of natural hazards and epidemics. We address this gap by summarizing the existing work, and pointing promising areas and future challenges for using data to support disaster response and recovery.

Uncovering socioeconomic gaps in mobility reduction during the COVID-19 pandemic using location data (preprint)

Using smartphone location data from Colombia, Mexico, and Indonesia, we investigate how non-pharmaceutical policy interventions intended to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic impact human mobility. In all three countries, we find that following the implementation of mobility restriction measures, human movement decreased substantially. Importantly, we also uncover large and persistent differences in mobility reduction between wealth groups: on average, users in the top decile of wealth reduced their mobility up to twice as much as users in the bottom decile. For decision-makers seeking to efficiently allocate resources to response efforts, these findings highlight that smartphone location data can be leveraged to tailor policies to the needs of specific socioeconomic groups, especially the most vulnerable.