FloodAdapt Tool

Tool description

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. 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.

Complexity

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The city needs data on topography, bathymetry and building assets and their potential maximum damage and flood damage functions for the initial set up of the tool in a new city.

Benefits of using the tool

The tool aids long-term planning and climate adaptation goals of cities. It can be used, for example to:

prioritize areas for flood risk adaptation,
develop flood-risk informed zoning plans,
pre-screen potential adaptation strategies, and
create visuals for stakeholder engagement.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.

City Hub experiences

In Cork, the FloodAdapt tool has been set up to support the city council in their 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.

Triple-A phases

The tool can be used in the following Triple-A phases:

Analysis phase:

– Impact assessments for status quo and different future scenarios

Ambition phase:

– Prioritization of areas for adaptation

Action phase:

– Screening and exploring different flood adaptation options, this is prior to and not instead of detailed feasibility and design studies for adaptation