SUPPORTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW FLOOD RISK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Led by:
Blue Marble Communications Ltd are a consultancy with comprehensive experience across the Engineering, B2B, Rail, Automotive and Military / Aerospace industries. One specialist area is their risk management portal based around the response to a terrorist attack – which helps prepare a business on how it would react should it or any of its staff be caught up in such an incident. Blue Marble wished to explore whether they could apply the same approach to developing a new flood risk portal.
The challenge
PROJECT PARTNERS
HOW TO TAKE AN INCIDENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN A NEW DIRECTION
Blue Marble are already established as leading providers of a Terrorist Incident Management System. With climate change bringing increased flood risk and flood events causing disruption and financial impacts to businesses, there is growing need for business support in this area. Blue Marble wished to explore whether a new Flood Risk Management programme could be developed on similar lines to their pioneering Terrorist Incident Management System (TIMS). This could be a disruptive piece of technology and innovation within a market saturated with physical flood resilience products. It would empower an organisation to assess their flood risk via an online-based platform and plan appropriate flood resilience measures to mitigate the flood risk to an acceptable and managed level.
Although an expert in risk assessment and business processes, Blue Marble Communications were not familiar with the specifics of client-based flood risk assessment. They sought intervention from FIC to create a framework for the development of the software platform. The eventual platform will provide online assessment of flood risk level and a corresponding collection of flood resilience measures to mitigate the risk.
The solution
PROJECT LEAD
Dr Elena Kuvinshinova,
Lead Researcher
PROJECT TEAM
Dr Steven Forrest, Lecturer,
Energy and Environment Institute
Dr Kate Smith, KE Fellow,
Energy and Environment Institute
Dr Robert Thomas, Senior Research Fellow,
Energy and Environment Institute
DEVELOPING THE FRAMEWORK FOR A NEW SOFTWARE PLATFORM
The objective of this intervention was to work co-operatively between the Flood Innovation Centre (FIC) and Blue Marble Communications Limited to develop a robust, resilient, flexible and fit for purpose flood risk management system with an ultimate aim of widespread adoption across the market.
The intervention created a framework for the development of the software platform. A flowchart of a flood risk assessment portal for businesses was developed including sophisticated and detailed description of elements of the future online platform.
The most important and novel aspects of comprehensive flood risk assessment included:
– Reviewing the parameter sets of flood risk mapping;
– Research into indicators for the parameter sets;
– Mapping vulnerability of different businesses to floods;
– Review ways for the indicators to be ranked and combined, based upon existing flood risk models and relevant academic literature;
– Building up a ranking approach based on an ‘importance score’ of indicators;
– A thorough search and identification of potential sources of data for parameter sets;
– Developing a risk assessment approach based on a triangle “hazard – exposure – vulnerability” that are regionally specific (England, Wales, Scotland and NI);
– Identifying sources of unified datasets of exposure against different types of flood event for given hazard severities.
The results of the research project include recommendations for the implementation of the main conclusions into the flood risk management model, to feed into the development of the novel online-based flood risk management portal for the B2B market.
Blue Marble consultancy will assess the applicability of the results to the development of an effective flood risk assessment model, and will control the technical content of the report to be transferred to the software product.
“The academics at the Flood Innovation Centre quickly determined the scope of the project and followed up with a very comprehensive model that provided the focus for the development of the portal. Without this intervention, we wouldn’t be in a position to realise our vison of the flood portal”
Timothy G Steele, Managing Director
Blue Marble Communications Limited
The RESULT
BUILDING FLOOD RESILIENCE INTO THEIR BUSINESS CONSULTANCY SERVICES
The team of experts provided Blue Marble with a principal draft of the online flood risk assessment portal. Once implemented, it will form the basis of a novel product for the business consultancy market. The new product will promote awareness of flood risk, enables businesses to independently assess their flood risk level and will form a set of flood management measures to tackle the risk.
