Dialogic Data Innovations for Sustainability Transformations and Flood Resilience: The Case for Waterproofing Data
34 Pages Posted: 21 Oct 2022
Date Written: October 6, 2022
Abstract
Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and have increasing impacts, which disproportionately affect marginalised and impoverished communities. Adapting to the new climatic conditions and building resilience to disaster risks such as floods are some of today’s most significant challenges. This article presents and evaluates a novel methodological approach for co-producing urban data innovations for sustainability transformations, which draws on the dialogic pedagogy of Paulo Freire to contribute to achieving just, inclusive, and equitable outcomes for urban resilience. This approach has been used in a transdisciplinary international project with study sites in Brazil and has generated three main methodological innovations: making data practices visible, engaging citizens and communities with flood data, and sharing data stories. Our study shows these methods have been able to expand the types of data used in disaster risk reduction and engage more diverse social groups in data generation, circulation, and usage. Our approach has revealed novel climate-resilient, data-enabled transformation pathways that exploit a wider set of transformative roles of data for flood resilience. This has not only contributed to filling data gaps for climate risk analytics but also enabled citizens living in flood-prone areas to make sense of citizen-generated and official data to improve day-to-day decision-making, helping them to turn early warnings into early action to protect lives and livelihoods.
Keywords: transformations, sustainability, floods, urban data, climate adaptation, resilience
JEL Classification: O35, 054
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation