Executive summary

Humanitarian and development organizations face mounting barriers to assessing needs. Traditional data collection methods are often insufficient in fast-moving and chronically insecure contexts. Nighttime Light Reflectance (NLR) data gathered by satellites, which is freely and publicly available, has become a broadly accepted proxy for economic and other human activity, has been used in studies on natural disasters, human settlements (including refugee camps), and energy production, among other topics.

This paper outlines how the NLR can and has been applied to answering questions and filling data gaps by aid actors, highlighting research conducted by Mercy Corps across several countries. The paper is intended to serve as a primer on NLR analysis and as a “menu” of potential NLR applications for aid actors, with the goal of providing a means to continue to make evidence-driven decisions in contexts where data is scarce, variable in quality, or inconsistent in geographic or temporal coverage.

Specific to Syria, this paper reviews Crisis Analysis–Syria’s regional GDP estimation approach using NLR, its application to gauge the level of damage after the February 2023 earthquake, and a research paper that used NLR to measure where re-electrification projects in northwest Syria had been most effective. Further, the research paper previews an upcoming research piece by CA–Syria that uses shared NLR dynamics to define inter-community relationships, which are used to identify distinct economic regions that will be published before the year’s end.