Navigating the Complexities of Flood-Risk Information Design
Integrated, transparent, and region-specific information can help to improve the assessment and design of strategies to manage flood risks.
Photo by Tom Fisk via Pexels
Projections of current and future flood risks are deeply uncertain. This poses major challenges for both characterizing and communicating risks to end users (e.g., researchers, engineers, and practitioners). We review current approaches to creating and communicating flood-risk information that end-users can trust and use responsibly. Possible avenues for improvement include (a) refining model diagnostics and uncertainty characterization to identify simpler model frameworks, (b) increasing information transparency and accessibility, and (c) improving our understanding of the links between decision-making and risk communication.
We offer insights about potential avenues for producing more actionable property-scale flood-risk information. Advances in computation and Earth system sciences offer a range of new and innovative ways to estimate flood risks. We highlight the importance of advancing transparent, open-access, and region-specific models that are simple to communicate and usable for decision-making.
Creating flood-risk information requires collaboration across many organizations, disciplines, and scales. Such collaboration is challenging, but there are many opportunities for improvement. Collaborative online web platforms could help information producers share code and data, improving reproducibility. Improved uncertainty characterization and model diagnostics can inform simpler designs that enhance usability. Simpler designs that are credible may vary by use case, requiring distributed efforts to distinguish the primary risk drivers in different contexts. Information accessibility may improve when information is communicated through visual styles that express risk drivers and their associated uncertainties. More research is needed to understand the linkages between visual styles and decision-making. Our findings underscore the need for integrated, transparent, and regionally tailored flood-risk information to better guide adaptation decisions and policy-making.