An EU-funded project is seeking to capitalise on social media by enabling citizens to monitor and report on their own environment and become the first line of defence against flooding.
Recent events in England, central Europe and elsewhere have once again underlined the human and economic costs of flooding. The number of people who will be affected is predicted to double over the next 70 years, with annual damages increasing from EUR 7.7bn to EUR 15bn.
The EU-funded WeSenseIt project was launched in October 2012, with the aim of strengthening Europe’s response to water management and to directly engage with citizens and communities on the front line.
So far the project team has successfully tested the concept of engaging citizens to monitor water levels.
WeSenseIt is developing the concept of a citizen-based water observatory, where communities form part of a two-way information chain. The advent of mobile phones and social media means that citizens can be fully active in capturing, evaluating and communicating valuable information on water levels, creating cost efficiencies and acting as early warning systems for over-stretched local authorities.
“There are so many rivers that it would be impossible to monitor them all with sensors,” explained project coordinator Fabio Ciravegna from the University of Sheffield in the UK. “Not all necessary information can be captured with sensors. Moreover, cost is a major issue: often the cost of the communication infrastructure to transmit data dwarves the cost of the sensors themselves.”
Citizens – such as volunteer flood wardens in the UK or civil protection volunteers in Italy – can help by taking measurements using new apps currently being developed by the project and sending information and images by phone.
They can also help by reading existing sensors and sending authorities the data via mobile apps. The collected data will be made available through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).
New technologies and approaches to water management are being tested and validated in three EU countries: the UK, the Netherlands and Italy. In Italy, an evaluation involving some 500 volunteers simulating a flood in the city of Vicenza was completed at the end of March 2014. The project has also been asked to provide assistance in supporting the city of Vicenza during the evacuation of some 50 000 people, in order to allow an unexploded World War Two bomb to be diffused.
One of the project partners is now seeking to commercialise and bring to market a social media analysis tool developed by the team in 2013.
The tool, which carries out large scale social media analysis to help emergency responders during large scale floods, found an application in monitoring large city wide events in England. Events involving over 600 000 citizens were monitored with excellent results, reflecting the breadth of potential applications of this kind.