DDR Day in Ethiopia, the presentation of myDEWETRA.world and RISICO ETHIOPIA

To celebrate the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, a conference was held in Ethiopia on October 15 with the participation of representatives of the National Disaster Risk Management Commission (NDRMC, the Ethiopian civil protection agency), African Union Commission, United Nation Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), IGAD, Addis Ababa University and Bahir Dar University. On this occasion, the  results of the project Disaster Risk Reduction Capacity Building in Ethiopia: development of an information management system for early warning for forest fires in Ethiopia, implemented by UNDRR and CIMA Research Foundation, were presented. Within this project, the RISICO ETHIOPIA model, which allows to assess the danger following the ignition of a fire, was implemented and integrated into the myDEWETRA.world platform. The overall system allows the forecasters and end users to know when, where and how severely wildfires may affect the country. 

More in detail, the event allowed to show how the myDEWETRA.world platform allows to integrate the information coming from RISICO ETHIOPIA with the national ones and produce automatic ad hoc bulletins that provide forecasts for the next seven days. These bulletins are produced directly by the national agencies: Environment, Forest Climate Change Commission, National Disaster Risk Management Commission and National Meteorological Agency. In addition, the platform enables fire risk management agencies to   employ ad-hoc hazard maps that have been produced using advanced machine learning techniques  

Pictured are the posters used for the RISICO ETHIOPIA booth and presentation and myDEWETRA.world. The materials presented contain a description of myDEWETRA.world, outlining its features and illustrating how it allows for the acquisition and integration of various spatial and temporal data to analyze exposure. 

A second banner presented the results of the analysis of historical forest fire events in Ethiopia with respect to the probability of forest fires occurrence and their potential severity  Potential severity was calculated by means of the RISICO ETHIOPIA fire danger prediction system.  

And finally, a third poster presented an example of a forest fire early warning bulletin (fed by RISICO ETHIOPIA outputs) along with the key/legend to interpret the color-coded three-day hazard forecast.