Mapswipe for SDGs 3 & 13: take urgent cartographic action to combat heat vulnerability of manufactured and mobile home communities

Abstract

Our research has established the extent to which extreme heat disproportionately impacts manufactured and mobile home communities (MMHC), posing challenges in achieving both targets of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 of ‘good health and wellbeing’ and SDG 13 of ‘urgent action to combat climate change impacts’. In Maricopa County, Arizona, USA, an alarming statistic of annually 30–40% indoor heat-related mortality occurs within a mere 5% of local housing stock dedicated to MMHC. Effectively addressing the multifaceted nexus of heat vulnerability and housing precarity necessitates the availability of geospatial microdata. Yet, given the idiosyncratic nature of ownership tenure within MMHC communities, sufficient microdata at the household unit level remain notably elusive through conventional tax records or other publicly available sources. In this paper, we assess how employing MapSwipe, a crowdsourcing application affiliated with the Missing Maps initiative, improves the completeness and precision of existing MMHC cartographic data inventory. Our approach harnesses MapSwipe’s micro-tasking methodology to identify absent MMHC locations within the state of Arizona. The contribution of this research is to present a viable methodology that organizes geospatial microdata around SDG initiatives and web-based volunteer mapping to effectively target the resources required to address the heat vulnerability of MMHC.