Anticipating the flood

FEDERICO ROBLEDO; DIEGO MOREIRA; MAGDALENA FALCO

Montevideo

Conferencia; WCRP Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean.; 2014

Universidad de la República

There are evidences that many regions of the world and in particular South America are experimenting significant changes in the intensity and/or frequency of extreme events ? such as rains and floods ?. These events have large impacts and especially in the most vulnerable socio-economic regions . The aim of the present work is to show the progress achieved in Anticipando la Crecida (Anticipating the flood) Project, whose main focus is to contribute to the improvementto improveof the disaster risk management associated withto intense rain events and southeasterly wind driven floods in ?La Ribera? region, located in Quilmes city of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The project is based on both research and participative activities with the stakeholders (local authorities of??) involved in La Ribera. The region encompasses 7000 habitants in a 22 km2 vulnerable zone located by the Rio de la Plata coast at 20 km to the south of Buenos Aires City. The river is an extensive and shallow estuary with a NW-SE oriented funnel shape. Persistent and moderate to strong winds from the south/southeast usuallycan (produce?) induce floods along the southern coast of the river,(a phenomenon locally known as called ?sudestada?) by the local habitants who live there. The project explores both social and environmental (consequences, implications?)causes associated to these floods , and articulate adaptation strategies to such events, with prediction?s knowledge and state of the art relative technologies. The interdisciplinary approach is expected to integrate, scientific knowledge (both natural and social) with the one provided by the local community and institutions both natural and social science knowledge about the phenomenon, with the own community?s and institution?s knowledge. This project has been designed to be replicated in other affected regions in coastal zones of de Rio de la Plata.A field activity with the local Civil Defense has already been done, and an interdisciplinary workshop was also held with local authorities?stakeholders, professors, researchers and students of meteorology, oceanography, social sciencesAtmospheric and Ocean sciences, social sciences and engineering engineering academic programs as well as. Likewise, professionals of different national institutions with relevant responsibilities ? National Weather Service (SMN), Naval Hydrographic Service (SHN), National Institute of Water (INA) and National Geographic Institute (IGN) participated. The meeting improved allowed improving the communication dialogue between among scientist from different disciplines and local authorities, stakeholders; and helps to identify the identification of vulnerable regions where contingency plans has to be improved region needs in risk management and of . In this context concrete questions to be answered by each particular discipline has been formulated and raised. related to each particular discipline. In addition, different meetings were done between specialists of each area in order to develop specific tasks to determine, within each discipline, the contributions to the pProject.Additional participative workshops with the community, specific courses and field experiments / surveys? trips will be done in the near future to collect social and territorial information, which will be used to update and improve flood risk maps overof the region. Progress is also being made in collecting environmental data from past events that will be used in meteorological and oceanographic diagnosis, planned to improve current forecast tools. On the other hand, full communication channels of information about sudestada events are planned to be assessed ranging from the information providers (e.g. SMN, IGN, INA) to the local stakeholders.