WATER AND FIRE

There are two articles in this weeks Economist magazine that caught my notice vis a vis K4D.

Monitoring Forest Fires
Forest fires and fire fighting cost the United States several billions dollars per year. This article suggests that improved ICT is going to become available shortly to help reduce these losses. The technology will include satellite remote sensing, and remote sensing from pilotless aircraft. Prediction of the course of the fires would be done by computer modeling. I would expect decision support systems, perhaps including expert systems to be developed. And of course the media would be used to disseminate key information (such as the need for evacuation) to the public. This seems a prototypical example of using knowledge to save lives, property, money and time. And I would point out that if forest fires are a problem in the United States, they are much more of a problem in many developing countries. I have seen the pall of smoke from Indonesian fires covering huge areas in satellite photos.

Sharing the Guarani Aquifer
The Guaraní -- shared by parts of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay -- sprawls across 460,000 square miles and stores enough fresh water to supply 5.5 billion people with 100 litres a day per person for 200 years. It is close to Sao Paulo, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Asuncion. But its extent was only realized in the 1990s, and one city has pumped so much water out that the aquifer's level has dropped 60 metres in its area since the 1970s. Now the four countries, with financing from the Global Environmental Facility, have set up a small secretariat in Montevideo to study the aquifer and to think how to manage it. Understanding the aquifer is not easy, involving complex studies and analysis to map its extent, and computer models to simulate its behavior. Using that understanding to manage a huge resource shared by four countries will obviously raise significant diplomatic and engineering problems. Still, modern knowledge systems can contribute greatly to the sustainable economic development of this resource, which is likely to be critical to the region which is probably the most important economic engine in Latin America.