Two years of YouthMappers UFRJ
- Leia em Português
- The YouthMappers UFRJ chapter is completing two years!
- To celebrate, we interviewed experts on topics related to the disaster risk reduction.
- Por Raquel Dezidério Souto1
The YouthMappers UFRJ chapter was registered with the international project of the same name on March 14, 2023, and is coordinated by professors Dr. Manoel Fernandes and Dr. Raquel Dezidério Souto (IVIDES.org), and the collaboration of the Prof. Dr. Paulo Menezes, all affiliated to the the Laboratory of Cartography (GeoCart-UFRJ). The project has the technical support of IVIDES.org and a partnership with laboratories at UFRJ and other public universities in Rio de Janeiro.
The interviews were conducted between March 3 and 13, 2025 and you can now find out how some of Brazil's most renowned people think about issues related to disaster risk reduction (DRR). The interview with Major Wellington S. de Oliveira, coordinator of Civil Defense of Maricá City (Rio de Janeiro, Brqzil), focused on the actions of the Municipal Secretariat for Civil Protection and Defense and the obstacles they still face in dealing with problems. To gain an insight into the Academy, we interviewed professors Dr. Telma Mendes (UFRJ) and Dr. Monika Richter (UFF Angra dos Reis), who have been working on the South Coast of Rio de Janeiro, specifically in the municipality of Angra dos Reis, where disasters occur frequently. Added to this is the presence of the nuclear power plants in Angra, which adds a third type of risk (the technological risk), to the already recognized risks (the geological and hydrological risks). We hope that this activity will serve as a tribute not only to our chapter, but to all the people who work for the disaster risk reduction and who have contributed to its advancement in Brazil.
| Dealing with disasters: an interview with Major Wellington S. de Oliveira,
member of the Disaster Mitigation Group (GADE, in Portuguese) of the Ministry of Regional Integration and Development, Brazil |
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| Disasters and public management: interview with Prof. Dr. Telma Mendes da Silva,
from the Postgraduate Program in Geography at the UFRJ, Brazil |
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| Education and the perception of disasters: an interview with Prof. Dr. Monika Richter,
from the Angra dos Reis Institute of Education, Fluminense Federal University, Brazil |
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The panorama of risk and disaster reduction in Brazil
Over the last fifty years, Brazil has made relative progress in the development of standards, projects, plans and government programs in the three spheres of public administration (municipal, state and federal), but it still needs to resolve the bottlenecks that prevent us from bringing the statistics related to loss of life to zero:
- The lack of professional and technical training in some municipalities;
- The lack of knowledge of the Nature dynamics, which leads the population to occupy risk areas that are naturally unsuitable for habitation, such as hillsides or floodplains in valleys;
- Economic interests in areas rich in natural resources, but with a low human development index, which facilitates irregular occupation, through the installation of developments without the creation of adequate infrastructure to absorb the population increase in the locality, and the ignorance of the population regarding these issues;
- Corruption in bidding processes (and other types of public administration's contracting), with deviations of competence, function and/or purpose;
- The lack of recognition of the value of open data and open source programs, in the development of solutions to meet information needs in the pre-, during- and post-disaster phases;
- The low level of municipal revenue.
🎉 A bit of our history
The YouthMappers UFRJ chapter has developed training and collaborative mapping activities, using OpenStreetMap (OSM) and related applications, mapping marathons, as well as mentoring projects by researchers from Brazil and some countries in the Americas and Africa. As of February 2025, around 700 people have undergone some of our training, whether in the OpenStreetMap Training Course, workshops or short courses offered in response to invitations to events held in Brazil and abroad.
Our history has been marked by collaboration. Our first research project relates to the mapping of infrastructure for disaster risk reduction in Maricá, a Municipality in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The features are being mapped in OSM and a Web map is being developed with uMap , for public visualization of the data and information. We have the material support of the Civil Defense of Maricá, in the form of aerial images that will be used to validate the mapped features. In this regard, we would like to thank the Maricá Civil Defense for their support.
In 2024, the second year of activities, we organized the event Thematic mapping workshops with OpenStreetMap, with training in mapping specific features, such as points of interest (features that interest everyone, such as hospitals, schools or banks), importing data from the IBGE Demographic Census into OSM, mapping watercourses and other related features, mapping important features for reducing disasters risks; and mapping vegetation cover in OSM.
We also held the event 20 Years of OpenStreetMap! with the support of TomTom and the HUB YouthMappers Rio de Janeiro chapters (UFRJ, UFRRJ, UERJ, UFF Niterói and UFF Campos), to celebrate the anniversary of the OpenStreetMap project, the world's fastest growing open collaborative mapping project, created by Steve Coast in July 2004. And the Scientific Seminar in support of the Rio Grande do Sul, with the support of the Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) and with invited specialists who participated in the actions to deal with the catastrophe that hit the state in April and May 2024, with consequences up to the present day (March 2025).
🎉 Where are we going?
Take part in our activities to keep up to date with developments in our research. People from Brazil or abroad, members of the internal community of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (students, professors and technicians) or external community can participate. Applications can be made via the https://ivides.org/youthmappers-ufrj.
🎉 First anniversary interview
The first anniversary interview was conducted by Dr. Raquel Dezidério Souto, with Rogério Borba, an analyst at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the head manager of the Brazilian National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), INDE in Portuguese, and the video is still available on the IVIDES.org YouTube channel. and you can download the transcript of the interview at this link (in Portuguese).
[1] Dr. Raquel Dezidério Souto
Virtual Institute for the Sustainable Development - IVIDES.org