Heatwaves have become a growing concern in recent years, and this year they’ve hit Bangladesh harder than ever, posing serious health risks. Our team, Three Dot, is competing in the Forewarn Disaster Hackathon 2.0, where we’re developing an app to provide heatwave alerts and an AI assistant that offers crucial advice on heat-related health issues.

One of the key features of our solution is providing users with the location of the nearest cooling centers—places with public accessibility, where people can cool down safely. These could be shopping malls, super shops, or mosques—any space that’s well-ventilated and free for the public to stay in.

The challenge we faced is that such attributes don’t exist in OpenStreetMap (OSM) for Bangladesh. Drawing on my previous experience as the former president of YouthMappers at Eastern University, I took the initiative to map out potential cooling centers. We’re tagging these places with: 1) Cooling_center: yes and 2) Cooling_center_bd: yes, to create a reliable resource for users and develop our heatwave project on top of that. Initially, our target location is, Dhanmondi and Mohammadpur.

Our initial focus has been on mapping spaces open to the community, such as large shopping malls and mosques, so that people can find refuge during extreme heatwaves, even if just for a short time.