Presenters

Mr. Albert Slap

Albert is President and Co-Founder of Coastal Risk Consulting LLC, a geospatial technology, modeling and analytics company located in Plantation, FL. Prior to launching Coastal Risk, Mr. Slap was a nationally-recognized, environmental attorney and law professor. Over the years, Mr. Slap used America’s environmental laws protect public health and the environment by stopping water and air pollution, toxic waste dumping, and by forcing local governments to replace aging and polluting sewer infrastructure. His Clean Water Act citizen suits brought billions of dollars of re-investment in wastewater treatment plants and created tens of thousands of new construction jobs.

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Coastal Risk is a flood and natural hazard risk assessment technology company. Our mission is to help individuals, businesses and governments in the US and around the world achieve resilience and sustainability.

In the past year, Coastal Risk’s Technology supported nearly $2 billion in US commercial real estate investment and development. Coastal Risk’s unique business model combines high-tech, flood, climate and natural hazards risk assessments and high-value, risk communication reports with personalized, resilience-accelerating advice for individuals, corporations and governments. Our risk modeling and reports help save lives and property in the US. In order to take our system around the world, however, we need higher resolution DEMs. The 30m resolution currently available is a big obstacle to going international. This is something that we would like to get from NASA. Also, we are interested in high-resolution, “before-and-after” satellite imagery of flooded areas to compare with our modeling and to help individuals, businesses and governments understand how to better defend against floods.

Rebeka Ryvola

Rebeka co-leads the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre's interactivity team and works across the centre’s programmes to explore new ways to reach more of the world’s most vulnerable people. In addition to helping foster a culture of creativity, innovation and experimentation at the Climate Centre, she supports the team with the interpretation of technical information, the generation of educational and programmatic materials, and the creation of visual tools for learning and advocacy. Rebeka has a bachelor’s of science in global resource systems from the University of British Columbia and a master’s in environmental management from Yale University.

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What’s the forecast for humanitarian use of forecasting tools? Exploring innovative approaches

The Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre promotes the integration of climate science into humanitarian policy and practice. We know that if the best available tools aren't utilized, then there will be losses and suffering, as well as missed opportunities to build resilience. With partners, we develop innovative ways to connect forecasting and monitoring products with disaster management teams and disaster risk financing entities around the world. How does this play out on the ground? What challenges do we face with the existing weather and flood tools we utilize? What can we envision for a better future? In this interactive session, we'll collectively explore how the Climate Centre and others are preparing to improve how we link early warnings and early actions.

Simon Young

Simon has a background in Earth Sciences and, after completing a PhD in volcanology, worked for the British Geological Survey on a variety of projects, including as Chief Scientist and the first full-time Director of the Montserrat Volcano Observatory during the main phase of the volcanic eruptions on Montserrat between 1995 and 2000. Since then, he has worked as a risk management consultant, providing a broad range of disaster and climate risk management and financing services, including leading the development, implementation and operations of all three of the multi-country parametric insurance risk pools currently in existence (in the Caribbean & Central America, the Pacific and Africa) as well as various other parametric insurance programs and instruments. In addition to ongoing advisory work in Africa, Simon is a Strategic Advisor to the Capital, Science & Policy Practice at Willis Towers Watson, where he continues to lead innovation in the use of hazard and risk data in risk financing instruments to bring greater resilience to sovereigns, other public institutions and the private sector.

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APPLICATION OF EO IN PARAMETRIC INSURANCE INSTRUMENTS FOR RISK FINANCING AND CLIMATE RESILIENCE IN SUPPORT OF THE 2030 DEVELOPMENT AGENDA

Parametric insurance represents a major breakthrough in the accessibility of risk financing for natural disasters. Instead of compensating for actual assessed loss, parametric (or index-based) insurance instead uses measurement of the hazard itself as a proxy for loss, paying out a pre-agreed amount for an event with certain intensity, location and, sometimes, duration. This allows for rapid settlement and reduced costs – of claims adjustment / processing and in the margin added by risk takers for uncertainty in projected outcomes. The quantitative, independent and objective nature of EO data, and also its availability in real time, makes it ideal as a basis for parametric insurance, particularly in the developing world where claims data for policy pricing is non-existent. Examples of parametric products based on EO data already in the market include protection against high and low rainfall, use of vegetation greenness indices, and footprint mapping as a basis for flood protection.

Dr. Lauren Alexander Augustine

Dr. Lauren Alexander Augustine is the Director of the Program on Risk, Resilience, and Extreme Events at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Since 2010, she served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Risk and Resilience among others as member of the Advisory Board for the American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange program, and as juror on the Rebuild by Design resilience competition for recovery after Hurricane Sandy. From 2008-2013, she directed the Disasters Roundtable at the Academy. Her most recent positions at the Academy entail her developing a portfolio on natural disasters and ways that science can inform policy to reduce the risk and elevate society’s resilience to them.

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Dr. James Mitchell

Jim is Geospatial Services Manager at the Office of Technology Services for the State of Louisiana at Baton Rouge. Dr. Mitchell is a graduate of University of Michigan and of Duke University. He has more than 25 years of experience in geospatial applications and database management and development in hydrology, water resources, transportation, and emergency operations.

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THE SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL FACTORS THAT CHARACTERIZE HYDROLOGIC RESPONSE.

Hydrology is a science of extremes; droughts and floods. In either case, the hydrologic response arises from the combination of many factors, such as terrain, land cover, land use, infrastructure, etc. Each has different, overlapping spatial domains. Superimposed upon these are temporal variations, driven by stochastic weather events that follow seasonal climatic regimes. To calculate risk (expected loss) requires a loss function (damage) and a response domain (flood depths) over which that loss is integrated. The watershed provides the spatial domain that collects all these factors. This talk will discuss the data used to characterize hydrologic response.

Jurjen Wagemaker

Jurjen is Founder and Director of Floodtags, a social enterprise that analyses online media and user generated content for water management and food security. Jurjen has twenty years on-the-ground experience in water management. He has a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering at Delft University of Technology and worked on water and development projects in 15+ countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas. In 2014. Jurjen started as entrepreneur the data mining company FloodTags, analyzing online media for water management and food security.

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Using online media to connect flood risk management to the ground

Jurjen will share how FloodTags uses human observations from online media to detect and analyze new (and past) flood events. He also introduces a new approach to citizen engagement via chatbots in instant messengers. With this, local needs are revealed in detail and low-threshold two-way communication about flood risk is possible, even down to community level. How can these new techniques be functional in current flood risk management practices?

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