Articles

Incorporating ethics into the use of emerging technologies for Natural Disaster Management (NDM) is not just a responsibility; it is a necessity. Recognising these imperatives, TEMA adopted a collaborative, co-design methodology to align technological innovation with ethical responsibility.

In recent years, diffusion models have become powerful tools in the field of artificial intelligence for image generation. Their applications extend beyond traditional creative or artistic uses, proving highly valuable for scientific, engineering, and crisis management purposes.

Data from geo-social media can provide great added value for disaster management, as they offer a wide range of information (texts, images, videos, etc.) in near-real time. In order to be able to offer such an automated workflow, researchers at the University of Salzburg developed a methodology for relevance classification of Tweets for disaster management.

This articles dives into the decision to adopt the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), a globally recognised OASIS standard designed to facilitate the dissemination of emergency alerts, to ensure that TEMA's platform can communicate efficiently and uniformly across heterogeneous systems and stakeholders, including civil protection agencies, first responders, and local authorities.

In mid-September 2024, parts of Central and Eastern Europe experienced severe flooding due to heavy rainfall, with Austria, the Czech Republic and southern Poland being the countries most affected. The department for Georisks and Civil Security at DLR supported the work of authorities by providing automated analyses of satellite and public web data.

In May 2024, southern Germany experienced relentless heavy rainfall for several days, particularly affecting the regions of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. For effective mission planning, it is crucial for teams to have access to up-to-date data, including maps, satellite images and orthophotos. This information is provided by the Center for Satellite-Based Crisis Information (ZKI) of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR).

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) commonly referred to as drones, are a relatively new part in the work of civil protection. The proliferation of drones and widespread commercial availability has led to a wide adoption across Finnish rescue departments. The low price point of commercially available drones meant that rescue departments can purchase and trial drones at a low cost. Drones provide rescue departments with a number of benefits out of the box, with the possibility to upgrade them and provide further value.

This article explores the role of digital twins and interoperability in natural disaster management.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart solutions, the need for seamless interoperability among disparate platforms and technological frameworks has become a cornerstone of modern infrastructure. The CEF Context Broker (CB), an open-source initiative under the auspices of the FIWARE Foundation, emerges as a pivotal component in this ecosystem. It orchestrates the management of data and context to enhance connectivity across diverse systems. In the TEMA project Orion implementation is used to provide interoperability support for tools in managing Natural Disaster scenarios.