The New Humanitarian has curated six articles offering essential background and context on Myanmar. These pieces highlight the country’s complex “polycrisis” including conflict, displacement, and economic challenges, which are now further compounded by the recent devastating earthquake.
Excerpt from the latest Logistics Cluster Situation Update (08 April 2025)
Overland Transport
Air
Read more in the full situation update.
The United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) has been producing very useful satellite-based damage assessments, which we've been sharing through this newsletter. Today, we're highlighting their updated interactive web map that compiles these results. Given the limitations of satellite data, some ground photos have also been included for validation.
An academic report titled "In the Wake of the March 28, 2025 Myanmar Earthquake" has been released on ResearchGate. It brings together key findings on tectonic activity, past seismic events, and the wider social and economic impact. The report highlights the need for better seismic monitoring, safer building codes, and stronger international cooperation on disaster risk reduction.
Following the Myanmar earthquake, a mapping campaign was launched to contribute data on OpenStreetMap. Over the past 8 days, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), the local Myanmar OSM community (myOSM), and more than 1,032 volunteers have come together to map 307,277 buildings and 4,934 km of roads.
Many other affected townships still need mapping. Check out the HOT Tasking Manager for available tasks. Every contribution counts and is deeply appreciated.
The United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) has released more results from their assessment of structures potentially damaged by the recent Sagaing Earthquake. Using very high-resolution Pleiades satellite imagery, UNOSAT analysed areas in the Sagaing and Mandalay Regions.:
Please Note: This is a preliminary analysis based on satellite imagery and has not yet been validated in the field. UNOSAT welcomes ground feedback to refine the assessment.
CEMS has released more remote sensing products for Sagaing Earthquake Response. 22 areas of interest (AOI) have been analysed (out of 28 requested AOIs, more coming) with an estimated 5,059 buildings and 2.8 km of roads affected. More on the CEMS page.
Building on UNOSAT’s preliminary analyses and satellite imagery from THEOS-2 and Maxar, MIMU, with technical support from the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC), has developed a map showing probable damaged buildings in Mandalay and Sagaing areas. To improve accuracy, MIMU also used some field validation from MIMU staff on the ground. Within the analysis area, 1,853 buildings were identified as destroyed/damaged and 2,290 as possibly damaged.
Timely logistics information is important during disasters, and to meet this critical need, the Logistics Cluster has released an interactive map focused on the latest situation in Myanmar.
This will provide updates on:
Read the latest situation report from Logistics Cluster.
Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) recently released a comprehensive Damage Proxy Map (DPM) covering approximately 158,000 square kilometres, including Mandalay and many other cities and small towns in Myanmar near the fault rupture that caused the Mw7.7 earthquakes on 28 Mar 2025. The map was derived from SAR data acquired on 3 Apr 6:09 PM local time from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). The figure below shows an illustrative image of the map, and the map can be downloaded from this webpage (filenames: EOS-RS_20250403_DPM_S1_Myanmar_Earthquakes_v0.9.kmz and .tif)
The KMZ file is very light and portable (25 KB), making it useful for viewing the maps in the Google Earth app on mobile devices used by on-the-ground teams for field operations.
The GeoTIFF file is large (~1 GB) and can be drag-and-dropped into GIS software (e.g. QGIS or ArcGIS) for further analysis in support of decision-making efforts.
