Climate change puts many difficulties in front of people and structures. This is a problem that increases its danger day by day. A demonstration of this is the increasing of natural disasters.

Early warning systems are a great potential in this sense to enhance emergency institutions and emergency managers to meet decisions in advance before a disaster puts an entire region or state on knees. Communities risk their lives for this and the important thing is to spread the alert much before the risk.

Anyway, there is a gap in all of this: practice and research still lack studies that investigate how citizens can be involved in citizen science to support early warning systems. Until now efforts have been concentrated on developing systems, methodologies, and approaches rather than understanding citizens’ requirements or ways of better engaging citizens.

The aim is to determine elements of how citizen science and participatory early warning systems can be bridged by carrying out a mapping to evaluate the citizen science and disaster management to set up early warning systems.

The paper arrives from Brazil and it has been edited by six skilled members of many National Centers of monitoring nature systems in South Amerca as follows:

Victor Marchezini – Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais, São José dos Campos, Brazil and Programa de Pós-Graduação em Cincia do Sistema Terrestre, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, São José dos Campos, Brazil

Flávio Eduardo Aoki Horita – Centro de Matemática Computação e Cognição, Universidade Federal do ABC, São Paulo, Brazil

Patricia Mie Matsuo – Programa de Pós-Graduação Interunidades em Ensino de Ciências, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Rachel Trajber – Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais, São José dos Campos, Brazil,

Miguel Angel Trejo-Rangel – Programa de Pós-Graduação em Cincia do Sistema Terrestre, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, São José dos Campos, Brazil

Débora Olivato – Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais, São José dos Campos, Brazil