Abstract
There is evidence that the toll of death and destruction caused by natural hazards is rising. This is often ascribed to the impact of climate change that resulted in an increased frequency of extreme meteorological events. As a consequence, it is realistic to expect that the casualties and damages caused by floods will increase in the near future. Advanced weather forecast is a fundamental tool to predict the occurrence of floods and structural mitigation measures are crucial for flood protection. However, these strategies should be associate with tools to promote and increase natural-disaster awareness and nonstructural mitigation measures in the exposed population. To bridge this gap, we coupled innovative, ICT-based technologies with crowdsourcing. The idea is to exploit geospatial data gathered by citizens and volunteers with their own devices such as mobile phones to provide authorities with relevant information in case of flood emergencies. This paper describes the design and testing of an Android application named MAppERS (Mobile Applications for Emergency Response and Support), thought to enhance active participation and response of the population in territorial and flood-risk mitigation in Frederikssund, Denmark. The results of the piloting fully validate MAppERS as an effective tool to support the decision-making process during a crisis and to improve the awareness of the community and their disaster resilience.
Highlights
Floods affect yearly at least 20 million people worldwide and claim around 20,000 lives [1].The damages from floods will probably increase in the coming years as revealed by recent studies, linked to the predictable effect of climate change
The method is commonly adopted for active models in which information is sought directly from affected communities, or for other models in which real-time procedures like mapping, measuring, drop-down listing, and photos are outsourced to users that are randomly distributed in the territory [8]
The risk-communication process has evolved from an engagement of learning process to a widely active role of people and the public value included in risk management
Summary
Floods affect yearly at least 20 million people worldwide and claim around 20,000 lives [1].The damages from floods will probably increase in the coming years as revealed by recent studies, linked to the predictable effect of climate change. Flood events cause adverse impacts on citizens and the economy in Europe and globally, triggering a progressive shift of responsibilities from central authorities to local communities. In recent years, crowdsourcing has become an innovative ICT-based approach to solve problems, by involving active participants to obtain needed information through distributed open calls in a network of people [3,4,5,6,7]. The method is commonly adopted for active models in which information is sought directly from affected communities, or for other models in which real-time procedures like mapping, measuring, drop-down listing, and photos are outsourced to users that are randomly distributed in the territory [8]. The emergency has to evaluate novel methods and techniques in
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