The Global Flood Partnership (GFP) is a community of researchers and practitioners from various countries and institutions including international research centres, the private sector (including insurers), national authorities, universities, governmental agencies and non-profit organisations.
GFP focuses on developing efficient and effective global tools for flood forecasting, monitoring and impact assessment to strengthen preparedness and response and to reduce losses from flood events worldwide.
This year's meeting took place on 25-27 June 2018 in Delft, the Netherlands, and was expertly hosted by Deltares. With the theme of 'Bridging the gap between science and users' the event brought together around 100 participants from around the world, including Europe, USA, China, Japan, Brazil and Zambia.
Together, we discussed how to best foster the dialogue between scientists and users, a key area that needs improving, and how GFP products and expert knowledge can work in synergy to provide key information to emergency managers at different stages before, during and after severe floods.
Defining guidelines and capacity building needs for global flood risk management.
A fascinating table-top exercise took place where participants were split into groups, assuming the roles for data providers, emergency providers, non-governmental organisation, city council members and other user groups. The aim of the exercise was to identify which datasets are useful at specific stages of a flood event, from 10 days in advance to few hours or days after the event has hit an area.
Flood forecasts, flood hazard maps, and event footprints are some of the most useful datasets before, during and after flood events – all of which are core to JBA's expertise, products and services.
Several organisations presented comparative analyses of flood products. Allianz showed a comparison of flood event datasets for the 2013 Central European floods and compared this with their claims experience for the event. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, compared seven different hazard maps for China.
JBA products were included in both of these analyses and the speakers provided positive feedback on consistency, resolution and utility in comparison to other commercial and research products. Something to feel proud of!
We both enjoyed the conference and hope to continue our involvement with the GFP. Many thanks should go to the organisers of the GFP event and to Deltares who, as usual, gave us a warm welcome and were pleased to show off their industrial-scale wave tanks and flumes!
If you'd like to know more about our flood forecasting and monitoring solutions or flood hazard data, please email John Bevington or Beatriz Revilla-Romero.
Visit our Flood Foresight web pages which provide further information about the benefits of using the Flood Foresight system. Interested parties can also request a free demonstration of the system.