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Developing a digital assessment toolkit for Asian Development Bank’s environmental and social safeguard implementation

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Jerman Cheung Jerman Cheung East Asia Press Office,Hong Kong
19 May 2022

Arup has been appointed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to develop an integrated assessment toolkit – a decision support tool that will help project teams to better and more quickly understand potential environmental and social risks and impacts associated with their development projects.

The new win follows from Arup’s previous engagement in ADB’s #DigitalAgainstCOVID-19 Hackathon, where our in-house developed digital toolkit won the second runner-up in the competition.

The toolkit includes a suite of Arup’s digital solutions integrating unmanned aerial vehicle technology, GIS (geographic information systems), AI (artificial intelligence), AR (augmented reality) and GPS (global positioning systems) for baseline data collection, analysis and visualisation to perform seamless assessment of the impacts on land, people and environment of ADB’s development projects. 

Through this digital toolkit, a key matrix of cross cutting issues and potential constraints surrounding any proposed project area will be identified and outlined, with a strong, clearly visualised output for technical, management and investment teams’ advanced decision making.  It enables ADB to comprehensively address environmental and social risks and impacts arising from its development projects, which has been a challenging task due to the need to consider numerous factors such as remote locations and areas with relatively poor spatial data visibility.

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Digital technologies are today’s most powerful drivers of change. The toolkit will help us leverage on the digital opportunities and solutions to strengthen our environmental and social safeguard implementation in our development projects. ” Felix Oku Senior Social Development Specialist (Safeguards), Asian Development Bank

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We’re excited to support ADB to deliver its strategic aims and enhance ways of working using our strong software application design and development capabilities and experience in the built environment. ” Sankar VS Sankar S. Villupuram East Asia Digital Services and Products Leader

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Arup has been appointed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to develop an integrated assessment toolkit for environmental and social safeguard implementation.