Roaming during the floods: the rule that reconnected thousands of phones in RS
We rarely think about our mobile carrier in everyday life. It ensures that calls go through and messages arrive, and it tends to go unnoticed until the moment the signal disappears. In a disaster situation, that failure starts to compromise people’s ability to ask for help. While mapping the communication technologies and responses mobilized during the 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul, we stayed in contact with Anatel in the state, which followed the crisis closely and helped us understand how the networks behaved throughout the disaster. It was in that conversation that we came across a mechanism rarely discussed when it comes to resilience, even though it was decisive in that context: the opening of roaming between carriers.
August 3, 2026
Wi-Fi, community networks and communication in emergency situations
Throughout this series of Project Diaries, we will present the technologies we are investigating as part of a toolkit for rapid response to climate-related incidents and disasters. Our goal is not only to explain how these technologies work, but to understand how they can strengthen communication in critical moments, especially in territories where telecommunications infrastructure may have been disrupted by floods, landslides or wildfires. When does communication become a matter of protecting life? What happens to communication when a flood cuts off the power supply, damages infrastructure and isolates communities?
June 26, 2026
What makes a technology advance to field testing?
In “How to compare technologies in Climate Crisis scenarios?”, we described how we organized our technology comparison process. Faced with such different solutions, we created technical sheets structured around nine points of analysis that were important for understanding, for example, that in a climate disaster scenario, characteristics normally valued in a technology are not always the most relevant. In many cases, a solution with lower transmission capacity can be more useful than a more sophisticated one, as long as it keeps working when power, connectivity, and infrastructure are no longer available.
June 12, 2026