Citizen Sensing: Urban Climate Resilience through Participatory Risk Management Systems

Citizen Sensing is citizens acting as sensors to collect and send information. It is a concept used for participatory collection of information where individuals, or groups of people, use their mobile devises to retrieve information about their environment. Mobile devises have multiple sensors, which can monitor key climate and environmental variables. This information as well as images and short texts recorded by the participants, are sent to a project database. Thanks to the devises' GPS or other forms of positioning systems, the collected information is geo-tagged (attached with coordinates). Besides, automatic weather stations have become accurate, inexpensive and thus also available for ordinary people, which collect weather information used for national meteorological institutes. Citizens can put up a Netatmo weather station on their own grown and share collected weather parameters via cloud services making it available for everyone. Rapid and frequent collection of geocoded information such as temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed and other weather and climate information is currently based on participation from ordinary people. This allows a large amount of site-specific data on weather events to be rapidly collected. The information collected from citizens can be about temperature, rainfall, or other climate and environmental information. The co-development of the PRMS with citizen groups helps ensure that it addresses their demands for preparedness to take appropriate risk management actions. NTNU has been much involved in the design and development of the prototype of the Participatory Risk Management System (PRMS), to provide relevant thematic base maps, and documenting the work in scientific articles (some published, some on-going). Relevant thematic base maps result from GIS-based hydrological modelling that show where water will flow and where it will accumulate (blue spots) after extreme rainfall, and temperature maps showing where in urban areas that are particularly hot (heat islands) and those places that are cooler. These thematic base maps are used in the PRMS which is both a web application and a native app for mobile devices. The development and testing during the last year have particularly been about: 1. Design a WayFinder application which can give users advices as which route to take in order to minimize or avoid exposed areas. In Trondheim we represent the exposed areas using blue spots while in Porto we use particularly warm areas during a heat waves. 2. Using Netatmo weather stations to map particularly exposed and vulnerable areas in Rotterdam. In the Rotterdam area, there is only one official meteorological weather station, but about 300 Netatmo weather stations. We use Netatmo recordings during a heat wave period summer 2019, compare these with official records, calibrate the Netatmo measurements and use these to identify the areas that, over time, are the most heat exposed areas in Rotterdam. This is integrated with demographic data on vulnerable groups (elderly people, 65+) and we identify which areas that are both the most heat exposed and the one with a high share of vulnerable population groups. 3. Using CitizenSensing to validate hydrological modelled data. Duringautumn 2019 and autumn 2020, about 100 students are using the CitizenSensing app each year to document, for instance, where the surface water run and/or where it accumulates after heavy precipitation in Trondheim. This idea of having an app visualizing for the users with a map at the place they are, how Trondheim could be effected by a heavy rain event has caught interest among local government in Western Norway and has therefore become an essential element in a new project about innovation in public sector. Look here for updated details about the project: https://citizensensing.itn.liu.se/ and look here for the prototype app: https://citizensensing.itn.liu.se/cs/

Informed citizens are more resilient citizens and feedback from students taking part in our three campaigns was that indeed their participation as end users raised their awareness about possible climate change effects relevant for their neighborhoods, and particularly so for pluvial flooding. Having maps of water ways and bluespots resulting from extreme rainfall overlaid google map on citizens mobile devises were considered very relevant. This resulted in an improved knowledge and awareness of the onset and emerging conditions of potentially harmful climate-related events (such as pluvial flooding) and site-specific recommended responses (such as route suggestion from the WayFinder app). The participatory approach on using citizens as sensors that took photos of flooded streets (for instance) were recognised as an opprtunity to "ground-truth" hydrological surface water modelling and has been a result having impact on several other ongoing projects.

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.