Assessing Vulnerability in the Urban Areas of Rio de Janeiro State (Floods and Landslides)

The State Government of Rio de Janeiro has recently taken steps to improve city’s spatial planning in view of better management of urban environment and disaster risk. One of the objectives is to develop robust disaster risk management tools to address and respond to the hydrological and geological hazards in the Rio metropolitan region. Of particular concern is to ensure that the future urban growth that will be taking place under constrained territorial conditions characterized by a fragile environment and high vulnerability to natural disasters does not result in increased exposure of assets and population to geological and hydrological threats. The eoworld project was aimed to demonstrate the added value of using satellite data to support Rio’s disaster risk management operations. A particular focus was on generating information that supports urban risk assessment to assist better planning of new housing development while mitigating risk of settlement pressures in hazard-prone areas. The project delivered three types of information products: • base maps indicating the status of urban development urban assets exposed to floods and landslides including EO-generated Digital Elevation Model, • analysis of selected flood events taking place in Rio Grande and Rio Anil watersheds as well as land use options that take into account the impacts of different land cover scenarios on flood propagation, • landslides susceptibility analysis indicating landslide prone areas using EO-based terrain deformation information that can be early indicator of a landslide threat.

Technical Officer: Philippe Bally

Starting Date: 2011-01-01

Suppliers:
Netherlands Geomatics & Earth Observation B.V. as supplier - prime
Critical Software SA as supplier - prime
National Observatory of Athens as supplier - sub
Hansje Brinker as supplier - sub
Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais as supplier - sub
Hidromod-modelação Em Engenharia Lda. as supplier - sub

Users:
Gestaõ das Bacias Hidrograficas as user - partner/collaborator
Rio de Janeiro State as user - partner/collaborator
Rio State Institute of Environment as user - partner/collaborator
FundacaõCEPERJ Centro Estadual de Estatistica, Pesquisa e Formacão de Servidores Públicos do Rio de Janeiro as user - partner/collaborator
FUNDAÇÃO GEO-RIO (landslides) as user - partner/collaborator
The Departamento de Recursos Minerais do Estado do Rio de Janeiro as user - partner/collaborator
World Bank as user - partner/collaborator

Services:
flood risk analysis (Disaster Risk Management)
terrain deformation for hydrogeology: landslides (Disaster Risk Management)
digital elevation / terrain model (Basic Mapping and Cartography)