Mincyt's AI Damage-Mapping Tool — Venezuela Fuses Multimodal Models With Before/After Satellite Imagery After the June 2026 La Guaira Earthquakes

Following the earthquakes that struck northern Venezuela on 24 June 2026, particularly La Guaira state, the Ministerio del Poder Popular para Ciencia y Tecnología (Mincyt) built an AI tool that compares pre- and post-earthquake satellite and drone imagery to automatically classify damage. According to Ronald Delgado, Mincyt's AI director, the tool combines the before/after imagery with open multimodal models (Dino B3, Minimax and Kimi) to analyse damage levels by area, generate specific geographic coordinates of affected sites, and produce colour-scaled heat maps of impact intensity — from red (highest damage) to yellow (lowest). Outputs were provided to Civil Protection, the National Bolivarian Armed Force, and the Presidential Commission for Infrastructure Review to support emergency operations.
The work was carried out under Activation 1036 of the International Charter Space and Major Disasters, a mechanism through which multiple space agencies pool imagery after large disasters. The Agencia Bolivariana para Actividades Espaciales (ABAE) combined optical high-resolution imagery with InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar), which measures millimetric deformations of the earth's crust, processing more than 1,400 satellite images into over 100 value-added cartographic products identifying structural damage, infrastructure impacts, road conditions and isolated communities.
These figures are self-reported by the implementing ministry and space agency. No independent audit of the AI classifications' accuracy was found in public sources, and the tool operated alongside separate, independent AI damage-mapping efforts by NASA, Microsoft AI for Good and the EU/ESA using some of the same satellite feeds after the same earthquake, so public sources do not make clear how much of the classification work is distinctly homegrown. The initiative is also framed within a government political programme ("Gran Misión Venezuela Renace").

Read the full analysis: https://abae.gob.ve/abae-evalua-danos-sismicos-con-imagenes-satelitales-opticas-y-de-radar/