Comprehensive Flood and Impact Modeling: Advanced Quantitative Tools for Emergency Management and Societal Resilience

Natural hazards such as floods pose significant threats to communities worldwide, impacting lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure. Effective flood modelling in combination with accurate impact assessments are crucial for enabling timely interventions, effective emergency management, reducing disaster-related losses and enhancing societal resilience.

This work presents recent advancements in a comprehensive toolset for worldwide application, integrating advanced flood and impact modelling in a flexible way. Our tools quantify critical aspects of emergency planning and management, including the estimation of the number and location of (socially vulnerable) people affected by floods, the identification of individuals that should be warned and evacuated, the impact on populations in terms of accessibility, the identification of potential and available evacuation and provisioning routes before, during and after hazards, and the resultant time and distance for populations to the nearest shelter. We integrate social vulnerability and socio-economic characteristics into our analyses to prioritize socially vulnerable areas.

Our dynamic modeling of flood depths, extents, and durations utilizes the open-source flood model 'SFINCS'. The open-source impact model ‘RA2CE’ quantifies disruptions to road infrastructure due to any natural hazard, equipping road operators, spatial planners, and emergency managers with actionable information. The advancements were recently applied to a real-world case study in Mozambique in a participatory workshop with local stakeholders from the cities of Beira and Quelimane. 

This work provides applicable solutions for prevention, planning, early warning, response and recovery, extending across most disaster risk phases and significantly contributing to the Sendai Framework's goal of reducing disaster risk and losses in lives and livelihoods.