On 4 September at 14:15, Ago Tominga will defend his doctoral thesis, “Spatio-temporal mobility dynamics in crisis management: population and individual level implications”, to obtain the degree of Doctor philosophiae in Human geography and regional planning.
Supervisor:
Associate professor Siiri Silm, University of Tartu, Estonia
Opponent:
Professor John Östh, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Summary
In today’s world, people are more mobile than ever: they commute, travel, work remotely, live between multiple homes, or move across borders. As a result, crisis officials have little information on the whereabouts of people and of the whole population. In a crisis, this mismatch can lead to poor decisions due to poor situational awareness or underestimated risks. This thesis explores how information about people’s everyday movements can help societies prepare for and respond to emergencies. The research uses passive mobile phone data and smartphone-based GPS tracking to study how people move and where they stay, both at the level of whole populations and individual lives. It focuses mainly on Estonia, but also includes Estonians living in Finland during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work also draws on interviews and workshops with crisis officials to understand what kind of information they actually need. The findings show that people’s movement patterns are usually quite regular: daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms mean that historical mobility data can already support many prevention and preparedness tasks, such as planning rescue services, public shelters, or evacuation routes. Some areas – especially coastal regions, tourist destinations, and second-home areas – experience large temporary population changes that static data fail to capture. At the individual level, the studies reveal that people differ in how flexible and independent their mobility is. Age, household structure, neighbourhood, and social ties all affect how easily people can move away from danger areas or adapt in a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic also showed that crises can lead not only to disruption but to long-term changes in everyday mobility. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that using dynamic mobility data can improve crisis management, if such tools are developed together with practitioners and used routinely before disasters strike.
