Infrastructure Civil Protection in Portugal Digital
The National Civil Protection System (SNPC) has a strong collective risk inherent in situations of serious accidents or catastrophes, to mitigate their effects and to help people and goods in danger.
The national and territorial organization of the SNPC has evolved, as well as the structure of its vertical command and control and the human and material resources it affects. It is essential, in Portugal Digital, to structure the SNPC’s virtual space as a whole, providing it with a national platform containing as relevant informational entities for its performance and applications with the most adequate procedures for each situation, whether in preventive terms, want correctives.
Among the relevant informational entities are, in addition to people, critical infrastructure, urban and rural buildings, and other heritage elements, with economic, social, cultural and environmental value, whose protection it is important to maintain for their relationship to the national life.
Among the relevant applications are how they provide real-time information on who is doing what, where and for what, in order to allow generalized knowledge of how events are developing, promoting the informed cooperation of all citizens in the collective effort to respond to emergencies, as well as those that define the most appropriate procedures for each situation.
The full integration and empowerment of local structures, namely at the municipal level, is still far from enabling the full use of the potential that their knowledge of reality and their proximity to the population has to offer.
The promotion of municipal and local structures to the forefront of the SNPC appears to be essential in this context, as they are the ones who hold the proximity knowledge of the real country, which must always be updated, which must be critically validated in the field of operations . Its role as an independent source of truth on the SNPC virtual platform will therefore be fundamental.
Distinguished full professor at IST and founder and emeritus researcher at INESC