Waterproofing Data: Engaging citizens for data-driven sustainability

Climate change is causing extreme weather events to become more frequent and more severe. This raises serious challenges for many communities, including those vulnerable to flooding and other rain-related hazards. Extreme rainfall events can be particularly devastating in more physically and socially vulnerable areas. However, major data gaps exist around the world about the local impacts of extreme weather events to vulnerable communities. This lack of information currently undermines the establishment of effective strategies for improving resilience, including better early-warning systems and community-based risk reduction.

To address this issue, the Waterproofing Data project investigated how to build communities’ resilience to flooding, by engaging communities and stakeholders in Brazil in the process of generating, circulating and using flood-related data. The project was conducted by an international, transdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners from Brazil, Germany and the UK.

In this closing event, we invite researchers and practitioners interested in the topic to discuss the results achieved in the Waterproofing Data project and to work together on synthesising information from other related initiatives and to work a collaborative research agenda for future research. The format of the workshop will include invited presentations, followed by an interactive collaborative session.

The presentations will introduce the innovative methods and co-produced a social data-driven innovations achieved by Waterproofing Data, which combine community data and analytics to improve the resilience of communities to flooding. These include ethnographic methods for making social practices around data visible (“data diaries”), a method to engage communities in data generation for flood resilience (“data gardening”), as well as a citizen-science mobile app, a model curriculum for schools, and a data analytics platform for developing early-warning models. These outputs and outcomes have been co-produced and successfully trialled with 300+ school students and civil protection agents in Brazil and have the potential to be translated to engage citizens from vulnerable communities around the globe in transformative adaptation.

The Waterproofing Data project received funding via the Belmont Forum from an international coalition of funders (Economics and Social Science Research Council in the UK; FAPESP in Basil; and BMBF in Germany) to enable the collaboration of an international, multidisciplinary research team led by the University of Glasgow, and including the University of Warwick in the UK; Heidelberg University in Germany, along with the National Centre for Monitoring Natural Disasters Alerts (Cemaden) and the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil.

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Host or Publisher Urban Big Data Centre & Centre for Sustainable, Healthy and Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods