The FloodAdapt tool is a decision support tool intended to accelerate climate adaptation actions by making it easier for local and regional agencies to understand their flood risk under different future conditions. FloodAdapt can be used to assess compound flooding, that means any combination of marine, rainfall and riverine flooding, with or without the added effects of future sea level rise, changes in rainfall patterns and storminess and socio-economic developments. The user interface of the FloodAdapt tool makes powerful and efficient flood hazard and impact models easily accessible to users without a computational modeling background. It helps users to define, simulate and visualize flooding scenarios and their impacts and to explore effective strategies to reduce flood risk. Scenarios consist of user-defined or historical weather events, projections of future sea level, climate and socio-economic developments, and user-defined adaptation strategies such as floodwalls, levees, pumps, urban green infrastructure, raising, floodproofing and buying out homes.
The city needs data on topography, river and coastal bathymetry and existing flood protection measures. Required information on building assets can be sourced from open data, but locally available data may produce more detailed and accurate outputs.
In Cork, the FloodAdapt tool has been set up to support the city council in its long-term flood risk management planning. This decision support system makes it easier to understand flood risk under different scenarios and test various adaptation options. The results can be used to inform adaptation pathways development.
The tool aids long-term planning and climate adaptation goals of cities. It can be used, for example,
Once set up for the city, the tool empowers city staff to explore different future scenarios and strategies and to create powerful maps of future flood risk for community engagement without the need to hire consultants. It is useful for a first screening of options before the assessment of promising options is put out for tender.
The tool needs to be configured for each location. A simple set up without validation of the underlying models can be made with ~2 person days. Pre-processing local data and calibrating the underlying models can take several person weeks.
The tool can be used in the following Triple-A phases:
Introduction to FloodAdapt: FloodAdapt Intro Video
User manual: Flood Adapt Documentation
Gundula Winter
gundula.winter@deltares.nl
Deltares
FloodAdapt can be used to assess the effectiveness of adaptation options and thus support the design of adaptation pathways or resilience pathways. The CRC Tool can help to identify urban NbS at a small scale, which can be integrated at the city-wide scale in FloodAdapt. FloodAdapt can also be used to explore the approximate dimensions of required urban NbS measures beforehand CRCTool is applied.
FloodAdapt can be used to aggregate flood impacts and risk for areas and groups and can link well with the Social Vulnerability Index Tool.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101036599.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101036599.
During an extreme rainfall event, Jan watches in fear as water rises dangerously close to flooding his apartment. His experience highlights the urgent need for climate adaptation in Gdynia, inspiring the community to take action and build a more resilient future together.
