Instituto Superior Técnico and Instituto Nacional de Saúde Doutor Ricardo Jorge (INSA) are pleased to announce the CLIMAEXTREMO portal, a platform that identifies, in real time, the buildings that present the highest health risk for their occupants during extreme weather events, such as heat waves or cold waves. The presentation session takes place today, 30th June, at 2 p.m., on INSA’s premises, in Lisbon.

This system uses a risk model of increased mortality, based on weather forecasts and health data, from all municipalities in mainland Portugal. The data is crossed with another model that considers the construction characteristics of more than 2 million buildings throughout the country, which aims to predict temperatures inside homes.

The platform can be used by Civil Protection and health services to flag populations at higher risk, and to help designing strategies for intervention and flagging the most vulnerable populations. This portal also allows the registration of institutions and organisations to access detailed information on pre-selected locations, with the risk index, vulnerability and recommendations of the Directorate General of Health.

“The CLIMAEXTREMO portal allows the authorities and citizens to know the risk of death among the occupants of a dwelling during a cold or heat wave. New users should register on the portal and will then receive a warning email if the alert level is medium or high. The spatial resolution of these maps may go in the future to the statistical subsection level which, in the case of a city like Lisbon, represents a set of buildings”, explains Carlos Santos Silva, Técnico professor, researcher at the Laboratory of Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSyS)/Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research (IN+), and project coordinator.

Susana Pereira da Silva, researcher at INSA’s Epidemiology Department and co-coordinator of the project, stresses “this portal will strengthen the area of surveillance and early warning systems in two dimensions: improving the risk prediction models and increasing the spatial resolution”.

Portugal is one of the European countries most vulnerable to changes in weather patterns, despite a decrease in the risk of heat-related mortality after the implementation of contingency plans for heat waves in 2004. The current national alert systems for heat waves (ÍCARO) and cold waves (FRIESA), predict the increased risk of death based on temperature forecasts and are used by health authorities, civil protection and others with a view to an early implementation of preventive measures that can minimise their impact.