Challenges and perspectives of innovative digital ecosystems designed to monitor and warn natural disasters in Brazil

• Authors: Luciana S. Soler;Leandro T. Gregorio;Paulo Leal;Demerval Gonçalves;Luciana Londe;Érico Soriano;Jarbas Cardoso;Marcos Coutinho;Leonardo B. L. Santos;Silvia Saito
• Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems
• Year: 2013

The increasing figures of natural disasters and related human and material losses represent a major challenge to be faced by the Brazilian government, the scientific community and civil society all together. Landslides and floods resulting from climatic extremes have been associated not only to global climatic changes, but mostly due to the increase of population vulnerability and the lack of effective mitigation actions. Core governmental responses to mitigate such losses include the creation of operational centers for disaster monitoring and management -- Cemaden (National Early Warning and Monitoring Centre of Natural Disasters) and CENAD (Centro Nacional de Gerenciamento de Riscos e Desastres). The establishment of these institutions associated with investments to map risky areas are key to implement landslides and floods monitoring systems. Despite significant investments, the implementation of such natural disaster monitoring systems depend much on cooperative actions among organizations and entities from different sectors of the society. The main objective of this work is to present the challenges and perspectives of innovative digital ecosystems designed to effectively monitor, warn and respond to natural disasters related to landslides and floods in Brazil. The several methodologies adopted make use of technical, scientific and empirical knowledge to establish a rain gauge network of 1400 automatic pluviometers and 1100 semiautomatic pluviometers, distributed in more than 800 municipalities defined as priority ones by the Brazilian National Plan of Risk Management and Response to Natural Disasters. Pilot projects of landslides monitoring systems are also included in the methodology in key municipalities where the number of human losses has been significant in recent disasters. In order to develop such challenging methodologies, Cemaden has worked together with the Center for Information Technology Renato Archer (CTI), CENAD, a number of research institutions, the private sector, local and regional governments and non-governmental organizations as well as the civil society. The combination of different types of knowledge, technological approaches and levels of interaction to population under risk of such a variety of organizations shall configure a collective intelligence able to improve the efficiency and confidence of early warnings of landslides and floods, as well as to promote further commitment of local governments and communities to respond to warnings.