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Problem statement

This summer saw unprecedented flooding in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, China and beyond. Flooded areas included both rural and urban areas, with total property damage exceeding 10 billion euros. 200 thousand properties were left without power and as many as 242 people were killed. The world classified it as a trend in extreme weather.

There are many reasons for extreme flooding. Among them are heavy rains, overflowing rivers, broken dams, urban drainage basins, storm surges and tsunamis, channels with steep sides, lack of vegetation, and melting snow and ice. These challenges, unfortunately, can be experienced all over the world and each context has its specifics.

It is not necessarily a lack of technological predictions or data analysis but it is a procedure problem - what can a community, within a certain infrastructure, do to organize itself best to respond or prevent flood damage and loss?

Events this severe, over such a vast area of northwestern Europe, don’t just happen without warning. Take Belgium as an example. Scientists were tracking the storm as it headed southwards, and the European Flood Awareness System issued alerts of life-threatening floods to national authorities early in the week. But people were either told to evacuate too late, or not at all. The main issue this time was communication. For example, on the local flood websites there was no information about the flood on time and people were just unaware of the catastrophe that was approaching them so fast.

In this challenge, we will ask teams to produce a digital model of potential flood control measures that can be installed in a 16-city block area that allows for A/B/C analysis of different flood control options (NOTE: A flood control option can consist of one or more individual flood control measures). This model should take inputs from multiple dimensions including citizens data, cost of installation and maintenance, flood mitigation effectiveness under various conditions, different types of flood control measures, maintainability of the infrastructure, and more. The model should also provide an indication of flood control effectiveness (from 0% to 100%) along at least the following three dimensions:

1. Protection of citizens (e.g. prevention of loss of life and limb)
2. Protection of individual property (e.g. preventing homes and business from damage)
3. Protection of city infrastructure (e.g. elimination of the need to rebuild roads, bridges, etc)

(For example, raising all 16 city blocks by five meters would provide 100% effectiveness across all dimensions, but the associated cost would be astronomical and is therefore not feasible.)

Digital models can be developed in any tool that the team wishes to use provided that the Challenge evaluators can have access to the tool at the end of the competition. Microsoft Excel is an acceptable tool for development of the models. Teams wishing to develop more complex models (and learn more about digital modeling as a side benefit) are invited to use the open-source Comet / CDP4 platform offered by the CAC’s partner RHEA Group. Teams desiring to use Comet will receive a free two-hour training session and will be given online access to pre-installed instances of Comet. All digital models should be accompanied by an assessment report not to exceed five pages that outlines the flood control options proposed and making recommendations on the top three options listing the benefits and drawbacks of each. This report should be written as if it were providing guidance to policy makers / city planners.

Challenge

How ​can ​we ​help ​city planners and engineers to design/adapt urban infrastructure/ for the protection of a city area from flooding as well as for a quick recovery process ​by providing a reusable digital model that can be applied by different communities ​when deciding on local flood procedure and sharing information with all local key stakeholders ​instead ​of ​having an unclear intervention for a very specific context and for potential cascading effects within it?

Sub-questions

• How can city planners build more resilient infrastructure by using this digital model solution?
• How to ensure a fast and convenient communication between stakeholders after flooding?
• How can we help people to become more flood resilient and adaptable by predicting their potential location, strength, time and other specifications?
• How to facilitate the decision making and implementation by involving the urban inhabitants of the area?
• How to allow for infrastructural flood mitigation designs to be self-explanatory or intuitive in case of an extreme situation?

This challenge involves identifying and aligning the key stakeholders within an urban area for flood mitigation and recovery such as city planners, engineers, neighborhood representatives but also emergency response centers, insurance companies, communication service providers, citizens, policy makers, researchers and universities.

The team should produce a digital model of potential flood control measures that can be reusable and shared within communities. As the Challenge Owner, the Climate Action Center will provide a 4x4 grid of city blocks that indicates the types of urban space included (e.g. location of parks, mix of business vs. residential space, characteristics of the existing infrastructure, etc.). All teams will use this input in the development and testing of their model. Teams can score bonus points by capturing as many second order impacts as possible (e.g. disruption to essential service such as electricity, access to roads, etc.).

Read the article here

Criteria:

• The solution should provide an indication of flood control effectiveness along at least the following three dimensions: Protection of citizens; Protection of individual property; Protection of city infrastructure
• The model should take inputs from multiple dimensions including impact to citizens, cost of installation and maintenance, flood mitigation effectiveness under various conditions, different types of flood control measures, maintainability of the infrastructure, and more.
• It should be possible to install in a 16-city block urban area
• Focus on an approach that can be scalable to other cities and communities (not on a single flooding solution)
• Presents a creative approach to identify the multidisciplinary stakeholder group that has to be involved within each context
• Uses concurrent design (concurrent design and manufacturing involves simultaneously completing design and manufacturing stages of production to allow for products to be produced in less time while lowering cost)
• It is a plus if it makes use of the open-source Comet / CDP4 platform offered by the CAC’s partner RHEA Group
• The solution delivers an intake brief of whom/how to approach to tackle a local flooding resilience infrastructure strategy, a digital model which should be accompanied by an assessment report

Sources for open data

• Visualization tool of data sets from The Hague (data sets will be available in November) > https://denhaag.klimaatatlas.net/
• *The Hague Resilience Strategy document