– The first of its kind in Brazil, the Mapeia Minas program, developed by the Social Development Secretariat of Minas Gerais (SEDESE), monitors the risks of climate events to protect vulnerable communities and support municipal management
– The system relied on more than 600 hours of development from SoftwareOne and advanced cloud technology from AWS to deliver georeferencing and data analysis that improve decision-making for state government entities.
In an innovative action in Brazil, SEDESE (State Secretariat for Social Development) created the country's first project to predict natural disasters and mitigate their consequences, which relied on the development and intelligence of SoftwareOne, combined with the cloud resources of AWS.
The program, named Mapeia Minas, is capable of monitoring dams, floods, droughts and other climate events, integrated with the location of families assisted by the government, such as people living on the river, in vulnerable situations or living in risk areas.
disclosure
For its development, in addition to the government of MG, the Public Ministry, the Fire Department and the Civil Defense of the state were involved, entities that also act in cases of natural disasters. The unprecedented solution uses an AWS methodology called Working Backwards (funded in partnership between SoftwareOne and AWS), which predicts today everything that could happen in the future.
In order to develop a pioneering product in the Brazilian market and, above all, that really generated an impact on society, AWS, on the one hand, contributed cloud credits to SEDESE; while, on the other hand, SoftwareOne spent more than 600 hours of service in developing the tool, at no cost to the customer, which is part of its commitment to returning its gains to society, an objective that has several initiatives for both development technology, as well as people and support for social causes.
Cleyton Leal, Application Services Leader at SoftwareOne, highlights with satisfaction the great return of this project to society. “In addition to the benefits for citizens, especially those at risk, the system will also greatly help the management of municipalities, supporting planning for the current period so that the municipality can mitigate future risks, which is also a major objective of the tool”, highlights.
Development
For the development of Mapeia Minas, SoftwareOne used resources cloud native from AWS, whose services include data processing and geolocation, which were integrated into a sample of the CadÚnico database – a registry of low-income families in Brazil. Furthermore, the company integrated public alerts from the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET) into the system, which indicate climate forecasts such as rainfall intensity, low or high humidity, among others.
The result was the creation of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that now allows SEDESE to georeference people and control data through dashboards, with the map pointing out when there are weather alerts. In practice, the system is capable of searching for a specific municipality and checking the number and location of people at risk, according to weather forecasts, allowing preventive action, whether in relation to planning actions by defense teams. civil and social assistance, whether in relation to the distribution of humanitarian aid.
“Based on the proposal designed by SEDESE, SoftwareOne was the first company in Brazil to develop this type of solution, which is already common in first world countries, mainly in the USA. In this sense, the solution will allow government entities in Minas Gerais to work with proactive and preventive plans, which was not possible before”, comments Leal.
Scenario
Since 2020, problems related to rain have intensified in Minas Gerais, worsened by the climate crisis and global warming. From 2021 to 2022, the state was affected by a very large amount of rain that caused half of the 853 municipalities to enter into an emergency or calamity situation, leaving 70 thousand homeless or homeless people.
Faced with this serious panorama, the state realized that it was not fully prepared to deal with the problem and, even more so, that there were no actions to prevent the adverse events caused by the rains, which mainly affected families in vulnerable situations living in regions landslides and who depended on social assistance after losing everything in natural disasters.
In this scenario, Elder Gabrich, Special Advisor at the Secretariat of Social Development of the State of Minas Gerais, explains that social assistance policy was unable to provide a quick response to people in need and, often, neither resources nor financial conditions. “We had a very atypical 2021 that ended up demanding new actions from us, that's when we started discussing what could be done to prevent these families from being hit by climate events in such a severe way”, he says.
Gabrich reinforces that, in the midst of this moment, Wesley Matheus, current Chief of Staff of the National Secretariat for Monitoring and Evaluation of Public Policies and Economic Affairs (SMA/MPO), who, at the time of the project, was a Special Advisor at the Secretariat of Development Social Council of the State of Minas Gerais, began to discuss the need to promote preventive actions so that, when the rainy season arrived, municipalities could know which areas are most susceptible to being affected by the rains and also which families reside in these areas. “In these families there are children, elderly people, people with disabilities and people with reduced mobility, and we needed to create an action plan to be able to respond more quickly to all these people”, says Gabrich.
Matheus, who already had professional expertise in disaster management, explains that Minas Gerais has a great variability of situations to model a system like this, serving as a reference for other Brazilian states. “In addition to dealing with rain, the state also has a history of dealing with drought and also a component of disasters. Realizing this, we saw that by working properly we would be able to improve our capacity for both prevention and mitigation and response to disasters”, he comments.
Thus, SEDESE had the idea of building a system that would generate information about the risk areas that exist in the state, integrating it with information on where vulnerable families are located in order to prevent severe weather events. As it did not have the necessary IT structure to develop the solution autonomously, the Secretariat, led by Matheus as head of the data office, then sought a partnership with AWS and SoftwareOne to move the project forward.
“We managed to bring together the state's senior management around the topic and AWS was fundamental in advancing the process, as well as technical support from SoftwareOne, which actually enabled the structuring and development of the system within the AWS cloud of an agile and safe way”, says Matheus.
Gabriel Luiz Santos de Olivera, Data Scientist on the SEDESE Data Office team, highlights the results of the initiative. “We were able to create a system that addresses both ends: risk management and disaster management. Thus, we have information to make evidence-based decisions both to promote preventive public policies to mitigate risks, and to support vulnerable families after the climate event, which is something pioneering in Brazil”, he says.
Next steps
The Mapeia Minas MVP has already been delivered by SoftwareOne to SEDESE and the project is now underway. The idea is that the initiative will also be expanded to all other states that are part of COSUD (South and Southeast Integration Consortium), which will be able to use the same tool.
“Although we are working with data samples at this point, the project has met our expectations. We have received strong support from the SoftwareOne team to overcome our challenges and continue developing the system”, says Gabrich.
The expert also adds that the first major milestone sought is to be able to send periodic information to the municipalities of Minas Gerais during the next rainy season, which runs from October to March. “We want to offer information about risk areas, which families live in that region and the profile of these families, so that they know the problem and, therefore, know the level of difficulty in solving it in a flood situation, for example. example”, highlights Gabrich.
Leal reinforces that this movement will be very important for the country as it helps the population and government entities to take greater precautions. “In this way, it is possible to reduce population losses, directly impacting society’s quality of life”, he concludes.
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