Past Webinar Recordings
September 2021 Rational & Irrational Choices in Flood Risk Management
Although flood insurance has been available for decades in the United States, many households who live in high-risk areas have not purchased flood insurance coverage, despite mandatory purchase provisions that affect many. Dr. Craig Landry, a professor and natural resource economist from the University of Georgia, has been researching how people make flood risk management decisions, such as the choice to buy flood insurance coverage or not. In this webinar, Dr. Landry will discuss how individual expectations, perceptions, and beliefs influence personal choices in flood risk management and how social scientists can model such decisions to learn about underlying factors that motivate self-protection (or a lack thereof).
April 2021 Fathom: Industry Insights into Flood Hazard Modelling Methods
Fathom was formed out of the University of Bristol Hydrology Research Group, a world-leading authority in modelling flood risk. Since then, the company has grown significantly and now works with insurers, international development agencies, conservation agencies, academics, emergency responders and multi-national corporations on a global basis. In the face of the increasing challenges posed by climate change, this commitment ensures they are providing their customers and partners with market-leading flood models based on the latest science. Fathom has recently launched Fathom-US 2.0, a comprehensive national scale model that combines inland, fluvial, pluvial and coastal flooding under a 2020 climate scenario rather than solely relying on historical records. The complex data analytics and model coverage enables a variety of stakeholders to confidently forecast flood risk and implement the appropriate mitigation measure.
Resilient-C is a free, online platform designed to help coastal communities in Canada connect with and learn from other communities that share similar hazard risks and profiles. Quickly determine from our growing database of communities those that share similar conditions and hazards to your own and review the planning and development actions they have taken to address coastal hazard risks and improve resilience. The Resilient-C platform recently expanded to include over 150 communities in British Columbia, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Under the direction of Dr. Stephanie Chang at the University of British Columbia, the Resilient-C platform has grown from a pilot with 50 communities around the Salish Sea in BC to assess over 150 communities in four provinces against 25 quantitative and qualitative indicators to assess community similarity and hazards exposure. The platform’s database includes hundreds of actions these communities have initiated or implemented to address coastal and riverine flooding, earthquakes, tsunami, and coastal contaminant spills. The Resilient-C research team has classified each action by type, long-term strategy, and the stage of implementation, along with links directly to source documents.
Deltares is an independent institute for applied research in the field of water and subsurface. This webinar is presented by Annegien Tijssen and Reinder Brolsma who are specialists at Deltares working on projects related to flood risk, environment, infrastructure & adaptive planning. The CIrcle and Adaptation Support Tools are intended to help identify the indirect impacts of flooding hazards and support the collaborative planning of adaptation measures.
November 2019 Room for Rivers & Voices: A Comparison of the Room for River Approaches in Alberta and the Netherlands
Historically, both Alberta and the Netherlands have focused on physical infrastructure approaches to flood mitigation. However, following catastrophic flood risk in the 1990s, the Dutch government developed the Room-for-River (RfR) program, breaking from their 1000-year tradition of structural engineering approaches of ‘fighting the water’ to ‘living with water’. In Alberta, the high cost of the 2013 disaster and a growing sensitivity to the implications of climate variability triggered a reassessment of costly structural solutions and exploration of other approaches, leading to three RfR projects. In this presentation, I compare the RfR approaches in the Netherlands and Alberta through the Transition Governance Framework. Unlike transferable technological change, RfR requires fundamental institutional, governance, and cultural change, and hence is more challenging to implement. This presentation sets the stage for discussions on how a combination of policies and practices could make more room for rivers and voices in flood risk management.