Centre for Data Science & AI

Researchers at the Urban Big Data Centre, located in the College of Social Sciences, have developed an invaluable resource that pulls together data to help predict when flooding will occur, addressing a major data gap regarding the local impacts of climate hazards on vulnerable communities. This work is an output of a transdisciplinary and international team including the Fundacao Getulio Vargas and the National Centre for Disaster Monitoring and Early-Warning (Cemaden) in Brazil as well as Heidelberg University in Germany. They’ve developed a Waterproofing Data dashboard that cuts across data-driven sustainability and protecting society to connect flood data from communities, citizen reports and official sources around Brazil.

The Waterproofing Data dashboard is part of a larger ecosystem of data innovations that include a mobile app to collect data submissions from citizen reporters and a data lake to store, process and transform all sources of data found on the dashboard. These innovations have been co-produced with schoolteachers and disaster risk management professionals alongside a Guide for Schoolteachers to support using our data innovations in classrooms. They have been successfully trialled with 300+ school students and civil protection agents in Brazil and will be scaled up to engage citizens from vulnerable communities around the globe in transformative adaptation.

To be successful, the dashboard had to be readily usable by both community members and disaster risk professionals. In adopting a place-based approach, the platform exists to serve flood-prone communities that also suffer from poor flood-related data coverage and engage them in activities that can help to make their communities more resilient to climate damage. Users can identify recent and historical flood activity at a local level, and while the platform serves to enrich existing flood data coverage it also empowers communities to participate in collective, preventative actions for reducing disaster risks. Features of the dashboard include rainfall charts and maps, a flood map covering hazard zones across Brazil, and a National Overview Map of citizen submissions and average rainfall across Brazil.

The project has already proven to be a valuable resource for flood prone communities and was shortlisted for research project of the year in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences category at the Times Higher Education Awards in 2022. To read more on this important project, take a look at a recent blog from Joao and Andy.

The project T2S Waterproofing Data was financially supported by the Belmont Forum and NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Transformations to Sustainability, which is co-funded by DLR/BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) as part of its Social-Ecological Research funding priority, United Kingdom Research and Innovation Economic and Social Science Council, State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation/FAPESP, and the European Commission through Horizon 2020. It received complementary funding from a Global Research Translation Award of the Global Challenges Research Fund.

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First published: 1 January 2023