The flood resilience dashboard: community resilience

Communities around the world in flood-prone regions are increasingly aware of the benefits of using spatial data to better understand their predicament. With the advent of web mapping, free and open satellite data and the proliferation of mobile technologies, the possibilities for both understanding and improving community resilience are on the rise.

Here we present the “Flood Resilience Dashboard”, which is designed to put geo-spatial flood resilience data into the hands of practitioners. The objective is to provide a platform for practitioners in the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance which gives access to both community resilience data and freely available, peer reviewed flood risk data, which can be used for decision support at scale. This data will include among others the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) data, Vulnerability Capacity Assessment (VCA) maps, remote sensing derived information on flooding and other biophysical datasets (e.g. forest cover, water extent), modelled risk information, satellite imagery (e.g. night-time lights), crowdsourced data and more. Using two case studies, we illustrate how the above-mentioned datasets help to better understand community resilience. When co-developed with communities, these examples could potentially be scaled up and applied to similar regions around the world.