1. Clear Communication Matters: It is primordial to make sure people understand what the emergency platform and plans can and cannot do to prevent misunderstandings and unfulfilled expectations during crises. Existing community channels and WhatsApp groups are often the best ways to reach people. we also found that videos and messaging that reflect on people´s personal safety were those that achieved better engagement through social media. 2. Earn Trust in Tech: Trust is the cornerstone of behavior change. Overcome skepticism by showing that the digital solutions value privacy, even if it doesn't ask for personal details. Avoid negative associations by keeping the emergency platform distinct from the government to boost trust and user engagement. 3. Help Everyone Use It: Tackle digital literacy challenges, especially for older users, by making the platform visually friendly and easy to navigate - Our UX workshops helped use design an inclusive an intuitive interface. Use channels that are familiar to users - meet people where they are already talking about the issue. 4. Encourage Preparedness: To motivate people to prepare for emergencies, even when risks aren't obvious, is hard. We used Behavior Drivers Models (BDM) to understand users´ incentives and tailor messages to address reluctance and raise awareness. 5. Stay Flexible for Cities: Adapt to changing urban and climatic conditions by staying flexible in emergency response strategies, ensuring continuous preparedness for evolving challenges. Always tap into local knowledge for effective emergency planning, as residents know their area best.

During this learning cycle we developed 3 experiments: Community Emergency Plan: This experiment was synthetized in a document that has been diagrammed and validated by local government and emergency response institutions. The resulting Emergency Plan for Juan Diaz and Don Bosco communities will be delivered to the communities during the first weeks and January. The signage will be installed by the local government in Q1 of 2024. Local government has voiced their interest in repeating this process to create more emergency plans in other affected communities of Juan Diaz.              Dashboard of Integrated Data on the Juan Diaz River Basin: This dashboard was finalized and socialized with institutional and academic counterparts. We are in the process of signing an MOU with the Urban Risk Center of Florida State University in Panama who will take over the ownership of the dashboard to continue with its constant updates and maintenance. Citizen reporting platform: MapeaTuDesastre.org is a citizen reporting platform that was built using the API of the Open-Source Software Cognicity, already operating in Indonesia and the Philippines. After going through a series of design UX workshops, the tool of live for a test period of one month. During this month we tested both the behavior change messaging to incentivize the usage and sharing of the platform as well as the reporting itself. Our learnings are now being shared and presented to other PNUD office in the region that have shown interest in our work (Honduras, Guatemala, and Peru so far) which is aligned to their needs of setting up community-based early warning systems in their respective countries. Some academic entities such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have also shown interest and we have presented the project to them. We are to present the results to the government in Q1 of 2024.

During the collective intelligence process and focus groups, we identified that, despite the fact that this area is the most studied river basin of Panama after the canal, all the existing information was owned by different stakeholders and in different formats. There was no possibility to visualize the data on the territory and its evolution over time. Understanding this data gap led us to first create the dashboard, and then, when we understood that communities where communicating and sharing vital information through WhatsApp group in moments of crises, wit led us to test the citizen reporting platform. The idea behind this was to crowdsource real time information from communities affected by floods in order to allow them to inform and get informed of the evolving situation around them.    

It was necessary to use participatory methods such as collectives intelligence, UX workshops, participatory design and focus groups throughout the project in order to make sure that the solutions were being created by the affected communities and at the same time validated by the emergency response institutions and local government. This allowed for the appropriation and the ownership of the final products. We also used behavioral insights and BDM methodology in order to understand what type of messaging would resonate with communities and motivate them to report.

It allowed us to have access of real time information of the territories of people affected by urban floods. As IPCC puts it, "one of the biggest barriers to climate adaptation is the lack of updated and locally relevant information", and our experiments allowed us to have access to that. This was only possible because we interplayed different type of data using these innovative methods and open-source technologies, making the upload and access to the information created, accessible for all.

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