Located in the Himalayan mountains and separated by rivers, Bhutan’s topography makes transport challenging. Indeed, the roads connecting communities and settlements through or along mountains are no less than an engineering marvel. However, many of these roads are extremely vulnerable to geohazards such as landslides and debris flows.

Bhutan’s Department of Roads (DoR) which maintains some 3,000 kilometers of national highways across the country, recently held a training session on geohazards.  Participants learned about the uses of the Geohazard Road Asset Management System prepared on the ArcGIS Online Mapping platform for better road maintenance planning.

With a goal to streamline efforts surrounding road hazard planning, the World Bank Task Team in the Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management Unit, and ITS Geospatial teams collaborated to produce a web-based mapping dashboard. The World Bank team processed information required to quantify geohazard risks along the 3,000 km long national highways across all of Bhutan including terrain aspects. The final dataset included historical landslide locations, slope, and drainage areas, road asset aspects such as roads and bridges, and seismic and climatologic hazard information such as predicted flooding areas corresponding to various rainfall return periods.

This information was programmed into a web-based interactive dashboard that displays dynamic infographics, charts, and summaries based on user-selected filters. For instance, users can access road hazard information on a granular level such as a specific district or class of road. To ensure a smooth data transfer in the future, our team utilized an existing a mobile-based data collection app so that data from ongoing surveys conducted by DoR can be brought into the dashboard in real-time.

This feature details the key lessons in creating this interactive dashboard.