Image credit: Valencia’s Floods (Alfafar, 2 Nov 2024), Photo by Victoria Rovira Casanovas (permission granted by author)
Original article here.
Valencia has a rich history in water management, a legacy shaped by both triumphs and tragedies. This connection to water is embedded in the city’s identity, yet modern floods test its resilience in new ways.
During the recent floods, Valencians experienced a troubling paradox. In today’s connected world, digital information flows through traditional and social media, weather apps, and government alert systems designed to warn us of danger and guide rapid responses. Despite this abundance of data, a tragedy unfolded last month in Valencia. This raises a crucial question: how can we ensure access to the right data, filter it for critical signals, and transform those signals into timely, effective action?
Data stewardship becomes essential in this process.
In particular, the devastating floods in Valencia underscore the importance of:
1- having access to data to strengthen the signal (first mile challenges)
2- separating signal from noise
3- translating signal into action (last mile challenges).
Addressing First Mile Challenges: Ensuring Access to Actionable Data
The first mile problem is fundamentally about having timely, unimpeded access to critical data. Despite accurate forecasts by the Spanish weather service (AEMET), which warned of severe flooding risks, these signals weren’t accessible in ways that could prompt preemptive action. The crucial data about impending floods — including traditional knowledge, such as knowing which areas historically flood first — got lost in a sea of information from various sources — some accurate, others speculative or misinformed — making it difficult for the public to discern what was essential. Without seamless access to validated, community-specific data, citizens and responders alike are hindered in their ability to prepare adequately.
Improving data access means that communities need structured, real-time data that is reliable and accessible through multiple channels. Data stewards — whether people or digital systems — can play an essential role in curating and filtering relevant data to help citizens access high-confidence information, enabling them to take early preventive measures. By building networks that make data accessible across channels, we can strengthen community preparedness, ensuring that crucial signals reach those at risk before it’s too late.
Improving the Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Distinguishing Actionable Insights from Noise
Even with data access, another challenge remains: distinguishing critical signals from noise in a crowded digital space. During the Valencia floods, people received conflicting information, with some official messages minimising risk just hours before floods peaked. This noise obscured critical warnings, delaying response actions and putting lives in jeopardy. The government’s tardy warning came too late to be of any use as a valid signal, but what happened with the others that had been intermittently surfacing in the digital infosphere for days?
Effective data stewardship can improve the signal-to-noise ratio by curating data in ways that cut through the clutter. This could involve leveraging trusted digital stewards — such as community-appointed individuals or AI-supported systems — who filter and elevate validated, relevant data above the digital noise. These data stewards would sit in ecosystems such as in emergency response institutions, data spaces or data intermediaries with solid infrastructure and governance structures so that they can be trusted and held to account. Clear, trusted signals reduce the mental and emotional burden on citizens who are trying to decide whether to act or wait in an uncertain situation. By elevating the most critical information, data stewardship helps communities focus on signals that genuinely indicate danger, allowing them to respond with greater confidence.
Addressing Last Mile Challenges: Turning Signals into Swift, Coordinated Action
Even when we have access to critical data and clear signals, the last mile problem remains — ensuring that this information translates into immediate, coordinated action. In Valencia, delays in issuing government alerts meant that people went about their routines, unaware of the approaching danger. A decentralised network of digital oracles could act as a safety net, ensuring that if one alert system fails, others continue prompting action. By distributing trusted signals across multiple channels, communities can receive timely alerts, even if one source falters.
Public participation for inclusive and collective decision intelligence are also central in turning signals into action. This is illustrated by historical local precedents like the Tribunal de les Aigües, Valencia’s centuries-old water court, which was declared in 2009 Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. This court has transformed traditional water knowledge into decisive actions for generations. Similarly, modern Decision Accelerator Labs could integrate real-time data with community insights, cultural memory, and technical expertise, enabling rapid, consensus-driven actions. Combining data with local understanding ensures that signals don’t just reach people; they guide them effectively toward safety.
Valencia’s Jardí del Túria (Turia Garden) is another example of this. Following another catastrophic flooding in 1957, a decision was made to divert the river to the city’s outskirts and to turn the old riverbed into an urban highway and transport hub. Yet, growing citizen opposition, channelled through the rallying cry “The Turia riverbed is ours, and we want it green”, gradually shifted the plan towards creating the park that would eventually be inaugurated in 1987. The garden now stands as flood protection infrastructure, and as living proof that the deepest cultural knowledge flows from the ground up, and it can lead to more responsible, effective disaster preparedness and collective intelligence.
Building a Resilient Crisis Response System: The Path Forward
Enhancing Valencia’s resilience against floods — or any city’s resilience in a crisis — requires a focus on data accessibility, signal clarity and decision intelligence. Practical steps to achieve this include:
- Improving Data Accessibility: Establish data collaboratives for real-time data that ensure communities and decision-makers can access essential, validated data, whether through mobile alerts, public announcements, or community networks.
- Elevating Critical Signals: Data stewardship systems that foster data quality and coordination — placed in key institutions, from civil society, to public, private and media sectors — should curate and prioritise high-confidence data and actively filter out misinformation. Trusted digital stewards — human or AI-supported — can help amplify legitimate signals, reducing the time spent filtering conflicting information.
- Developing a Distributed Network of Digital Oracles: Implement decentralised alert networks that ensure redundancy. A distributed network of digital oracles can offer multiple, trusted points of access to emergency information, enhancing reliability.
- Embedding Participation for Inclusive Collective Decision Intelligence for Timely Action: Drawing from models like the Tribunal de les Aigües, integrate Decision Accelerator Labs that can combine real-time data with community wisdom, empowering collective, rapid decision-making.
It will take a long time for the people of Valencia to recover from the impact of the floods and the failures to preempt and minimise harm. While changes in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events are only expected to increase, we can have access to more data than we have ever had. We urgently need to build the ecosystems, institutions and both human and technical infrastructure that can help us turn the right data into actionable signals to mitigate and adapt to disasters.
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