Articles

The climate is quickly changing. Almost every day we are informed by television and newspapers about a natural disaster. Just to mention what happened this summer, Greece [1] is enduring the hottest July of the last 50 years due to a heatwave longer than six days. Northern Italy [2] is living in a different situation. Hail as big as tennis balls, winds as fast as a supercar. The Milan sky became dark at midday and the hinterland was affected by a tornado. The Mediterranean [11] Sea reached its highest ever recorded temperature at over 28.71c, beating the previous record of 28.25C set in 2003. The summer will still have much to say.

Information is a critical part in the organisation and execution of work in civil protection work. First responders such as firefighters collect information on emergencies to organize their work prior and during natural disasters. From traffic accidents, forest fires, floods, to rescue operations and inspections of buildings. To prepare for forest fires, climate data, terrain data, type of incident, and cause of fire are collected. The statistics are used to identify various risks that cause incidents, try to mitigate accidents, and to train and prepare appropriate responses when fires occur. With advancements in technology, remote sensing and data collection technologies can monitor, collect and analyze data efficiently to support the decision-making process prior, and during emergencies. The TEMA project will utilize existing data sources, supplemented with additional sources to create models on the further progress of forest fires and floods.

Energy utilities across the United States continue to face the challenge of reducing wildfire risk while also increasing their reliability as part of their ongoing operations. As droughts and weather events accelerate the spread of wildfire to more and more communities, we are seeing that this risk is not just a “California issue” anymore. Not only do risk managers at energy utilities need to know the probability of a wildfire, but they also need to know the consequence to their assets and service area from one ignition compared to another. In short, not all ignitions (fires) are created equal. Risk managers need the tools to understand the likelihood of a utility-cased ignition as they balance their overall wildfire risk.

In the past decade, we have witnessed spectacular breakthroughs achieved by deep learning in various applied and scientific domains. Despite their empirical success, neural networks are notorious for their black-box nature. Due to their inherent complexity, their inner workings are not readily comprehensible to human users. The emerging field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to make the decision-making of such opaque models more transparent, improving trust and usefulness for human users. Meeting explainability standards has just become a legal requirement, in particular for high-stake applications, under the EU AI Act. In the TEMA project, we aim to employ such methods in the context of natural disaster management.

Disaster Management is important for Sustainable Development because disasters can spoil years of efforts in a few minutes. To enhance Disaster Management and Risk Reduction, the TEMA Project aims to create a platform that will help model and predict Natural Disasters evolutions and 3Dmap affected areas.

Natural disasters are taking place around the globe and know no geopolitical borders, which underscores the need for transnational cooperation and collaborative solutions. Against this backdrop, science diplomacy for disaster management, henceforth referred to as “disaster diplomacy”, presents an opportunity for knowledge exchange by incorporating collaboration across regional, institutional, cultural, and disciplinary sectors.

User-generated data as a basis for geographical decision support has evolved from a basic research field to an application-oriented state. User-generated data is now widely recognised and a largely high-quality foundation for decision support in various application areas. The TEMA project will advance the use of geo-social media towards generic decision support, independent of geographical regions, languages, or use cases, and in near real-time.

While an early wildfire season in Canada is causing much trouble to people and nature, a storm pushed a cloud of smoke southward to the USA. There the smoke is causing the worst air quality levels in history, and this proves how wildfires can affect people’s lives even kilometres far from where they burn land. So, it is essential to implement projects like TEMA to help control wildfires.

The recent flood in Emilia Romagna showed that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are increasing, and we need to prepare more. In the Horizon EU framework, there is the TEMA project, where the partner organisations are developing a platform that will help predict natural disaster evolutions and help the situational awareness of First Responders, using as a pilot a 2021 event: the Ahrtal flood.