Reducing cascading impacts of flooding in Small Island States
Many Small Island States frequently face significant flooding, causing loss of life and damage to property, with cascading impacts on agriculture and infrastructure. Due to climate change, intensifying extreme weather events and rising sea levels will exacerbate these hazards. At the same time, these states are highly vulnerable to increasing climate hazards due to fragile infrastructure and high recovery costs.
Local adaptation to flooding requires an understanding of how effectively adaptation strategies, such as placing mangrove forests or building flood walls, can reduce direct and cascading impacts of compound flooding under future climate and socio-economic scenarios. But island communities often lack financial and human capital to develop their own risk assessment and adaptation decision-making support tools. This project aims to address these challenges by providing the necessary tools and knowledge to enhance resilience and effective adaptation planning.
The FloodAdapT Project, being implemented by Deltares, Deltares USA and Climate Analytics and funded by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), seeks to empower island communities. The goal is to help these communities better understand their compound flood risk, cascading impacts, and how these impacts will evolve under future conditions or can be reduced effectively with adaptation.
The project will apply FloodAdapt, a freely accessible compound flood adaptation support system, in Trinidad. This tool enables end-users to easily assess locally relevant compound flood events, future climate and socio-economic projections, and adaptation options, through a decision-support system. Working closely with local stakeholders, the project partners will co-develop cascading impact assessments, suitable adaptation strategies and effective communication products.
FloodAdapt has been developed with communities in mind, to empower them to ask the right questions and take informed decisions.
Gundula Winter, Project Manager
Additionally, the project will leverage synergies with ongoing community projects and promote uptake of the tools and methodologies in the wider Caribbean region. This will enable also other island communities to assess, communicate and mitigate cascading impacts in their region.
