Iowa flood data boosts global climate resilience effort - E&E News by POLITICO
Iowa flood data boosts global climate resilience effort - E&E News by POLITICO
The World Bank recently announced it will offer free flood risk data to 16 developing countries — a step partly made possible by lessons learned from a 2008 flood in Iowa.
The project is part of a collaboration between the World Bank and a British research company called Fathom, which created a global flood map. Countries particularly vulnerable to climate change — including Madagascar, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen — will get free access to the map, which includes data on inland and coastal flood risk today and in various future climate scenarios.
“Awareness is pivotal for managing and mitigating the devastating effects of flooding,” Fathom CEO Stuart Whitfield said in a statement. “We’re incredibly proud to be offering insights into flood risk not previously available for these data scarce countries, to help support future planning and resilience to water risk.”
The announcement follows growing research in recent years predicting that flood damage, already the world’s “most costly natural disaster,” will rapidly increase as the Earth’s climate continues to warm. Fathom, created in 2013 by hydraulic engineers at the University of Bristol, uses a combination of lasers and machine learning to build predictive computer models of flood-swollen streams.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.