OBSERVER: The Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) Risk and Recovery Mapping component celebrates its 10th anniversary

On 28 August 2022, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) marked an important anniversary. It has been ten years since its Risk and Recovery Mapping component was activated for the first time!

As part of the GMES Initial Operations phase (GMES being the original name of the Copernicus component of the European Union Space Programme), CEMS was the first service to be declared fully operational.

Since then, the service has never stopped evolving to better serve its users and has become a reference in the emergency management ecosystem.

The Risk and Recovery Mapping module (RRM) offers an on-demand provision of geospatial information, derived from optical and radar satellite imagery and from other relevant datasets, supporting emergency management activities related to the prevention, preparedness, disaster risk reduction and recovery phases.

The RRM service provides its products under two complementary modalities:

• RRM FLEX, for tailor-made studies, that allows covering any specific needs that the user might have, such as assets mapping or risk assessment of multiple natural hazards; and
• RRM STANDARD, which offers a predefined set of standardised products, that allows faster delivery. Typical products are impact assessments products for activations related to floods or wildfires.

A unique service with global coverage 

Over the past decade, the Risk and Recovery Mapping component of CEMS has delivered more than 1,000 products across 135 individual activations for 50 countries (as of 1 September 2022) to users from across the world. Stakeholders who can activate the service include the Emergency Response Coordination Centre of the European Commission (ERCC), any local, regional, national entity/organisation dealing with disaster management, from countries participating in the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, through National Focal Points, and in the rest of the world through the EU Delegations, but also United Nations bodies such as the World Food Programme, as well as Non-governmental organizations. CEMS Risk and Recovery Mapping products have proven their effectiveness in supporting preparedness studies and recovery activities worldwide and for all types of disasters or humanitarian crises.

The strength of the RRM products lies their capacity to:

• produce studies from very detailed local analyses (such as the EMSN134 activation, which consisted in mapping the impact of a forest fire in Spain in support of a police investigation) to nation-wide studies (such as national assets maps);
• cover both short-term events (a flood event) and long-term events, like soil subsidence in Vietnam (EMSN062)
• include specific datasets in the analyses, like in the EMSN135 activation which assesses the impact of a wildfire in Spain on forests on the basis of the national forestry dataset
• accommodate any specific user need through the FLEX mode, or to deliver results faster through the use of the Standard mode.

Examples of activities carried out by the CEMS Risk and Recovery Mapping (RRM) module

The CEMS RRM module provides geospatial information for the phases of the disaster risk management cycle related to preparedness and recovery. Since it does not deal with immediate emergency management activities related to disaster response, the type of services it can provide can be highly varied and complex.

The following examples give an idea of the diverse types of studies and analyses that have been conducted in RRM’s first 10 years of activity.

• Wildfires

In 2019, the module was tasked to carry out a forest fire risk assessment in two areas near Split and Dubrovnik, in Croatia. Several products were delivered highlighting forest fire exposure and risk, as well as the vulnerability of people and assets as a function of the seasonality of tourism. These products helped the local authorities to improve their preparedness and mitigation plans before the wildfire season.

On the other hand, the RRM module can be activated to deliver post-event delineation and damage grading assessments of wildfires. The following are three examples of activations and related products.  The impact on the soil, analysing the changes in the soil erosion and landslide risk of the affected area, can also be studied. The monitoring of the vegetation recovery and the effectiveness of recovery measures can also be assessed some time after the event. The EMSN072 activation is a good example: it was triggered five years after a wildfire in the municipality of Acebo, in Extremadura region (Spain).

• Floods

Last year, the RRM module was tasked to produce a retrospective assessment of the severe flood event that took place in Solingen, in the North Rhine Westphalia area, in Germany.

The objective of the activation was to estimate the maximum flood extent, maximum water depth, and flood temporal evolution during the period between 13 and 16 July 2021 using two flood delineation products depicting the flood footprint extracted from Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar acquisitions.

More detailed and in-depth information can be provided through the RRM FLEX mode while preparedness products can also be developed. A good example is the EMSN122 activation, which analysed the potential breach of a dam in Iraq upon request of the German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), on behalf of the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW).

• Volcanic Activity

RRM provides useful support for preparedness, recovery and management of volcanic eruptions and their consequences. A recent example is the intensive and extensive support to the Spanish authorities in the case of the Cumbre Vieja eruption in the island of La Palma (Canarias) in September 2021 that lasted for almost 3 months. During the emergency the RRM service provided more than 50 ground deformation analyses, during and after the volcanic eruption, and analyses of the changes in the soil erosion and landslide risks before and after the eruption (EMSN112, EMSN124). Upon request, the RRM module also provided updated high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEM) of the island (EMSN119) showing the recent changes in the orography o the island caused by the volcanic eruption, and providing information on the elevation changes, as well as on the volume and thickness of the lava flow.

RRM can also be used for preparedness activities with activities such as lava flow simulations such as in the EMSN047 activation on the Nyiragongo volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• Tsunamis, Earthquakes and man-made Disasters

Likewise, the RRM module has dealt with preparedness, recovery, and reconstruction monitoring activities for other types of disasters, such as tsunamis, earthquakes and man-made disasters.

In 2020, the RRM module was tasked by the Spanish General Directorate of Civil Protection and Emergencies (CENEM), on behalf of the authorities of the autonomous region of Andalucía, to develop tsunami risk analyses in the urban environment along 300 km of the Andalusian west coast. It ended up analysing an area of about 6,780 km2. The activities carried out allowed to deliver key information on tsunami hazards, exposure, and vulnerability for the buildings in the area, thus supporting the preparedness of local authorities. As a result of the successful results, a new activation was requested to also cover the eastern coast of Andalucía and delivered with EMSN116.

The activation EMSN074, instead, is an example of post-event activity related to earthquakes.

The RRM module was activated on behalf of the City of Zagreb to assess damages caused by the earthquake that hit the city on 22 March 2020. The products generated in the framework of this activation provided local authorities with an updated reference dataset of the city, a detailed damage assessment on roofs and chimneys in the aftermath of the earthquake, and a reconstruction monitoring one month later.

Another reconstruction monitoring activity has been conducted after the devastating explosion that changed the landscape of Beirut in August 2020. After the event, the World Bank Group, the United Nations and the European Union developed a Reform, Recovery and Reconstruction Framework (3RF) to provide a roadmap to ensure that people’s needs would be addressed throughout the recovery process. To complement the activities, the RRM module was tasked to provide data and information on the baseline damage assessment of February 2021, and subsequently six monitoring assessments of the reconstruction progress on a quarterly basis beginning in April 2021 and until July 2022.

• Multi-risk Analyses for Cultural Heritage Protection

In April 2022, for the first time since the launch of its service, the RRM module has been activated to perform multi-risk analyses for archaeological sites: those of Delphi and Ancient Olympia, in Greece. The activation was aimed to provide the National Secretariat for Civil Protection of Greece (GNSCP) with a set of evacuation plans for five types of disasters: forest fires, plain and flash floods, earthquakes, landslides and soil erosion.

The results of the activation are meant to improve emergency and management plans for better preparedness for hazards and potential consequences of climate change, but also to develop concrete evacuation and protection plans for visitors and employees of the archaeological sites in case of emergency.

• Assets Mapping

The RRM module also proved its usefulness by providing several EU countries with Nation-wide Assets Maps, such as those delivered to Germany, Sweden, Finland, and Austria. These maps were generated by combining a series of different datasets into a series of geospatial layers designed to enable cross-border studies and to compare potential and actual disaster damage across Europe using a reliable and uniform database.

• Humanitarian Crises

The CEMS RRM module has also and notably been activated several times to monitor humanitarian crises.

In 2021, it was activated by the European External Action Service (EEAS) on behalf of the World Bank Group to support the EU Delegation, World Bank, and UN within a Recovery and Peace Building Assessment (RPBA) of the conflict in the North of Mozambique, which was ongoing since October 2017.

The goal of the activation was to support the RPBA through the monitoring of the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps, analyse their status and composition, and focus on the land use/land cover changes before and after the camps were established.

Last but not least, the CEMS RRM module has also delivered tailored products to assess cases of severe food insecurity, such as the crop change detection activities performed for the conflict-affected areas of Nigeria (EMSN063, EMSN083, EMSN113).

Undoubtedly, the high-quality and science-based data provided by the Copernicus EMS Risk and Recovery Mapping module has helped to raise awareness on the importance that space data play in disaster mitigation and preparedness as well as in monitoring recovery activities. It has also shown its added value for preparedness and emergency management actors across the world.

The next 10 years of the RRM module are bound to see a growth in the scope of this service as a result of the positive trend in the number and variety of activations. Furthermore, the recently introduced possibility to use data acquired by aerial systems, both unmanned (drones) and manned (aircraft) will improve the timeliness, accuracy and usefulness of the analyses and enable to provide products even more tailored to user needs.

In addition, all these new features and future evolutions of the service will be addressed at the upcoming CEMS General Assembly, which will be held in fully online mode on 13 and 14 October.

Additional source of information

List of CEMS Risk and Recovery Mapping Activations:

https://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/list-of-activations-risk-and-recovery

All the products delivered by the CEMS Risk and Recovery Mapping module are provided with digital data that can be downloaded and integrated in the user’s GIS environment.

Products portfolio of CEMS Risk and Recovery Mapping module products:

https://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/ems/risk-and-recovery-mapping-portfolio

How to activate CEMS Risk and Recovery Mapping module:

https://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/ems/how-use-service