flood-adapt 1.1.3

A software package support system which can be used to assess the benefits and costs of flood resilience measures

FloodAdapt

FloodAdapt is a decision-support tool that seeks to advance and accelerate flooding-related adaptation planning. It brings rapid, physics-based compound flood and detailed impact modelling into an easy-to-use system, allowing non-expert end-users to evaluate a wide variety of compound events, future conditions, and adaptation options in minutes. FloodAdapt serves as a connector between scientific advances and practitioner needs, improving and increasing the uptake and impact of adaptation research and development.

To make decisions on flood adaptation, communities need to understand how climate and socio-economic changes will affect flood risk and the risk-reduction potential of various adaptation options. This type of information is usually costly to acquire, and models are often too slow and labor-intensive to evaluate all the scenarios required to understand the impacts and effectiveness of potential adaptation decisions. FloodAdapt addresses this by making rapid, physics-based compound flood modeling and detailed impact modeling accessible to non-expert end-users, allowing them to evaluate a wide variety of compound events, future conditions, and adaptation options in minutes.

FloodAdapt was developed as a rapid planning tool with a straightforward graphical user interface for scenario generation, simulation, and visualization of spatial flooding and flooding impacts. Decision-making needs at the community level were central to the design of FloodAdapt. Users can answer planning questions like: “How will potential adaptation options reduce flood impacts?”, “How will those options perform for different types of events, like hurricanes, king tides, or heavy rainfall?”, “Which neighborhoods will benefit most?”, “How will those options hold up in the future?”

Users specify what-if scenarios composed of historic or synthetic weather events, climate or socio-economic future projections, and adaptation measures. The backend of FloodAdapt leverages the open-source, state-of-the-art process-based compound flood model SFINCS (https://github.com/Deltares/SFINCS) that can accurately predict compound flooding due to surge, rainfall, and river discharge, at a fraction of the computation time typically required by physics-based models. The damage model included in FloodAdapt is the Deltares-developed flood impact assessment tool Delft-FIAT (https://github.com/Deltares/Delft-FIAT). It calculates the flood damages to individual buildings and roads, and – when social vulnerability data is available – aggregates these damages over vulnerability classes.

FloodAdapt can greatly support adaptation planning by allowing users to explore many scenarios. It can be used to evaluate flooding and impacts due to compound weather events, like hurricanes, king tides, and rainfall events. Users can evaluate flooding, impacts, and risk considering user-specified projections of sea level rise, precipitation increase, storm frequency increase, population growth, and economic growth. Users can also test out adaptation options, like sea walls, levees, pumps, home elevations, buyouts and floodproofing.

Recent developments of the decision-support system include (1) simplifying and partially automating the setup of the SFINCS and Delft-FIAT models, (2) improving the user experience, (3) better supporting adaptation planning with improvements like metrics tables, infographics, better visualizations in the user interface, adding in additional adaptation options to evaluate, and calculating benefits of adaptation options, and (4) incorporating social vulnerability and equity into the evaluation of adaptation options to support equitable adaptation planning.

FloodAdapt is currently in an intensive development stage. Independent usage of the repository will be challenging prior to end-of-year 2024. FloodAdapt documentation will be expanded on throughout 2024.

Getting Started

Please review our developer guide for information on how to install and use FloodAdapt locally.