Público publishes results of the FORLAND project – Hydro-geomorphologic risks in Portugal: driving forces and application for land use planning, from the Center of Geographical Studies (IGOT-ULisboa), which created a risk index in order to establish the probability of the occurrence of a flood that may impact populations.
Journalist Camilo Soldado, from Público, analyzed the contributions of the Forland project, coordinated by Susana Pereira, in two articles. The first focused on the municipalities with the highest risk of floods and a second article focused on landslides and the mortality rate associated with it – the latter also makes reference to another project from the Center of Geographical Studies, BeSafeSlide, which should produce results in 2021.
The index that results from Forland integrates three factors – danger, exposure and vulnerability – and the project identified the North of the country as having the municipalities with the highest risk of flooding. In the article “Between Douro, Tâmega e Sousa: study identifies municipalities with a higher risk of flooding“, the proposals for intervention and mitigation that the project presents are also illustrated.
In order to be able to predict landslides with the same degree of confidence as in the case of floods, Susana Pereira warns, in the article “Portugal does not have a landslide alert system“, for the need to monitor “access daily or hourly data “in order to create” precipitation thresholds”. This information must be contextualized in relation to past occurrences history, also identified by the Forland project. The creation of a system that can combine this information is precisely one of the objectives of the BeSafeSlide project, coordinated by Sérgio Oliveira.
Photo: Anna Costa
