Major grant award to create a new global flood model

Professor Ashworth - Professor of Physical Geography and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise – will apply expertise in river morphodynamics and flood prediction to understand how populations throughout the world respond to both repeated and sudden flood events. The project, termed EvoFlood, is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and University of Brighton will receive £301,423. A wide range of other partners will contribute an additional £424,000 to the project, including Arup, the Royal Geographical Society, United States Geological Survey, the Global Flood Partnership and humanitarian agencies.

The Brighton team – including a new post-doctoral researcher – will join up with the University of Southampton's leading WorldPop Research Group to use different forms of mobile data records to map population displacement and other responses to catastrophic floods.

Professor Phil Ashworth

Flooded Amur river in Russia

A key aim is to create the next generation Global Flood Model – a state-of-the-art predictive computer tool that can simulate flood probabilities and inundation extent across different regions. Project outputs - including new flood hazard and risk maps - will be shared on open platforms accessible to all.

Flooding is the deadliest and most costly natural hazard on the planet, affecting societies across the globe. Nearly one billion people are exposed to the risk of flooding in their lifetimes and around 300 million are impacted by floods in any given year. The impacts on individuals and societies are extreme: each year there are over 6,000 fatalities, and economic losses exceed US$60 billion. These problems are likely to become much worse in the future.

Professor Phil Ashworth said: “This is an exceptional opportunity to make major advances in our understanding of the magnitude, location and environmental controls on future flood hazard and risk around the globe. Brighton will be leading one of four Work Packages that will model population exposure and risk before, during and after major natural flood disasters. We will create new high-resolution data on population response and mobility during floods and tie this into our models of flood predictions for the coming decades.”

The EvoFlood project assembles an expert team from nine universities to integrate research skills in hydrology, earth observation, geomorphology, flood modelling, and population projection.

Professor Dan Parsons, Director of the Energy and Environment Institute at the University of Hull, and Professor Steve Darby at the University of Southampton, are the Project leads. In addition, there will be input from the universities of Oxford, Bristol, Reading, Birmingham, Exeter and Durham, alongside the work done by the University of Brighton.

Professor Parsons said: “Reliable tools are urgently needed to predict how flood hazard and exposure will change in the years and decades to come. Existing state-of-the-art Global Flood Models (GFMs) are used to simulate the probability of flooding across the Earth, but they are not without their limitations.”

Professor Darby added: ”Existing Global Flood Models do not represent the ways in which river channels and floodplains change through time by erosion and sedimentation. These GFMs instead treat rivers as fixed 'static pipes’. If rivers become shallower or wider, then their capacity to contain floods changes over time. Existing models that neglect this process therefore make poor predictions over the long term. It is this limitation that the EvoFlood team will tackle.”