1.48 - Citizen Sensing – Urban Climate Resilience through Participatory Risk Management Systems
Project Description
Urban citizens continually make a multitude of decisions related to climate-related risks that affect their safety, health and wellbeing, e.g. how to respond to unusual events, stormwater flow, flooding, high levels of suspended dust. CitiSense aims to co-develop a participatory risk management system (PRMS) with citizens, local authorities and organizations which enables them to contribute to advanced climate services and enhanced urban climate resilience as well as receive recommendations that support their security. It employs citizen sensing, which is citizens acting as sensors to collect and send information and also
novel means of citizen-technology interaction. Citizens, besides sending images, videos and texts will also interact with wireless sensor systems through a specially-designed app on their smart phones to upload and send monitored key climate variables to a project database. This allows a large amount of site-specific data on emerging risks to be rapidly collected. A web-based interface will display and visualize the data and information. When critical loads of selected parameters or identified number of posts are foreseen to be exceeded, or long-term trends are detected, site-specific recommendations to guide citizen responses will be sent through the CitiSense app and placed on the web portal. These can link to and inform existing guidelines and recommendations in existing climate-related risk management and adaptation plans. This platform also allows citizens and authorities to explore the available data collected by other citizens in other parts of the city. The co-development of the PRMS with citizen groups helps ensure that it addresses their demands for preparedness to take appropriate risk management actions.
The project has two objectives:
(1) to develop a Participatory Risk Management System that incorporates place-specific information, links to existing guidelines on urban climate risk management and adaptation, and functions as an integrative platform for citizens and relevant organizations at different scales,
(2) to analyse if, how and to what extent the PRMS has potential to increase preparedness and appropriate responses by citizens and authorities to increase urban climate resilience in different European and climate contexts.
Research Team
CITTA
- Ana Monteiro
- Asma Mehan (June 2019 - June 2020)
- Filipa Malafaya (April 2018 - January 2019)
- Marisa Graça (January 2020 - May 2021)
- Paula Gonçalves
- Paulo Conceição
- Sara Santos Cruz (coordinator)
OTHER PARTNERS
- Linköping University (LiU) /Sweden - Coordinators of Project
- The Norwegian Institute for Science and Technology (NTNU) / Norway
- Deltares / The Netherlands
Financial Support
- Project Reference FCT: ERA4CS/0001/2016
Stage of Progress
- Concluded in 2021