Originally published in our November 2024 newsletter (Issue 25)
Mariana is a researcher in the field of climate impact analysis, who pioneered the use of text data to monitor the socio-economic effects of extreme events across multiple sectors. Her research bridges natural and social sciences, focusing on understanding interactions between impacts and their social and climatic drivers.
Dr. Mariana Madruga de Brito is an interdisciplinary scientist who works at the intersection of natural and social sciences. She holds an M.Sc. in Engineering and a Ph.D. in Geography, focusing on socio-economic vulnerability to floods. She is a co-speaker of the Working Group ‘SocialScience Water Research’ at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and coordinates the Research Network ‘Text in Natural Hazards’.
Mariana’s expertise lies in employing computational methods such as natural language processing (NLP), pattern mining, and network analysis to monitor how hazards like droughts and floods impact society. She was one of the first to highlight the potential of using large unstructured text datasets — ranging from news articles to government reports — as a reliable source for rapidly assessing impacts across sectors such as agriculture, health, forestry, transportation, and energy [1,2]. Her research has demonstrated that these novel data sources can complement traditional metrics, providing a richer understanding of how extreme events unfold over time and space [3,4].
Currently leading the Computational Sociology for Extreme Events working group at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Germany, Mariana’s team is developing cutting-edge methodologies to capture complex cascading effects of climate impacts at the European and Global scale. Her recent work advocates for integrating diverse quantitative and qualitative methods, highlighting the value of methodological pluralism for multi-sector dynamics research [5]. In this context, she emphasizes the complementary or even convergent roles for analyses based on quantitative (e.g., data mining, systems modeling) and qualitative methods (e.g., mental models, qualitative storylines) in investigating the interrelationships between climate impacts.
She recently secured the prestigious Volkswagen Stiftung grant for her CASCADE project, which aims to unravel how extreme events lead to cascading disruptions in social and economic systems. By combining text-based data mining, surveys, and expert interviews, CASCADE will provide new insights into how the consequences of extreme weather reverberate across borders.
Find out more about Mariana via her website or connect with her on X.
Highlighted Articles:
[1] de Brito, M.M., Kuhlicke, C., Marx, A. (2020): Near–real–time drought impact assessment: a text mining approach on the 2018/19 drought in Germany Environ. Res. Lett. 15 (10), art. 1040a9 10.1088/1748-9326/aba4ca
[2] Sodoge, J., Kuhlicke, C., de Brito, M.M. (2023): Automatized spatio-temporal detection of drought impacts from newspaper articles using natural language processing and machine learning Weather Clim. Extremes 41 , art. 100574 10.1016/j.wace.2023.100574
[3] Sodoge, J., Kuhlicke, C., Mahecha, M.D., de Brito, M.M. (2024): Text mining uncovers the unique dynamics of socio-economic impacts of the 2018–2022 multi-year drought in Germany Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 25 (5), 1757 – 1777 10.5194/nhess-24-1757-2024
[4] Sodoge, J., Reckhaus, Z., Kuhlicke, C., de Brito, M.M. (2024): Unified in diversity: Unravelling emerging knowledge on drought impact cascades via participatory modeling Clim. Risk Manag. 46 , art. 100652 10.1016/j.crm.2024.100652
[5] de Brito, M.M., Sodoge, J., Fekete, A., Hagenlocher, M., Koks, E., Kuhlicke, C., Messori, G., de Ruiter, M., Schweizer, P.-J., Ward, P.J. (2024): Uncovering the dynamics of multi-sector impacts of hydrological extremes: A methods overview Earth Future 12 (1), e2023EF003906 10.1029/2023ef003906.