SAFERPLACES employs innovative climate, hydrological and hydraulic, topographic and economic modelling techniques to assess pluvial, fluvial and coastal flood hazard and risk in urban environments under current and future climates.
The service is designed to advice identification and assessment of flood risk mitigation measures and plans, inform climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies, and help to foster multi-stakeholder agreements and partnership for resilience building.
In particular SAFERPLACES sets to:
- further develop and enhance, test and demonstrate applicability of efficient and scalable flood hazard and risk mapping and assessment service in urban context, largely needed for devising climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies and plans;
- facilitate multi-stakeholder dialog and identification of disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation measures and strategies,
- new business opportunities, and financial and economic incentives for behavioural and land-use changes, by employing nature or ecosystem-based solutions such as natural water retention and urban requalification

THE ISSUE
URBAN FLOODING: PLUVIAL, COASTAL AND FLUVIAL
Floods are responsible for 40% of these losses and together with storms denote the major natural hazard type in terms of economic damage. With high confidence, climate change is very likely to amplify extreme precipitation and flood hazards in many regions across Europe

THE INNOVATION
INNOVATIVE FLOOD RISK MAPPING TOOLS
SAFERPLACES employs innovative climate, hydrological and hydraulic, topographic and economic modelling techniques to assess pluvial, fluvial and coastal flood hazard and risk in urban environments under current and future climates.

THE PURPOSES
DEMOCRATIZING FLOOD RISK MODELS TO SUPPORT CLIMATE RESILIENCE IN URBAN CITIES
The service is designed to advice identification and assessment of flood risk mitigation measures and plans, inform climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies, and help to foster multi-stakeholder agreements and partnership for resilience building

THE APPROACH
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER CO-DESIGN & CO-DEVELOPMENT
facilitate multi-stakeholder dialog and identification of disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation measures and strategies, new business opportunities, and financial and economic incentives for behavioural and land-use changes, by employing nature- or ecosystem-based solutions such as natural water retention and urban requalification

THE VALUE
SAFERPLACES DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM
SAFERPLACES aims at supporting better flood hazard and risk evaluations, and identification of new opportunities associated with better prevention and protection and climate adaptation. The service fills two main knowledge gaps: (i) sound analysis of the current and future hazard and risk; (ii) a spatially-explicit economic assessment of flood impacts

THE CONCEPT


THE WEB GUI MOCKUP
Please take a look at the Web GUI MockUp available here:
RIMINI Pilot https://gecos.invisionapp.com/public/share/3HWTR34K4
COLOGNE Pilot https://gecos.invisionapp.com/public/share/BUWTR2Y47

USER’S REQUIREMENTS SURVEY
SHORT SURVEY : https://forms.gle/Wj95tRMrSUEHbgQc9
FULL VERSION: https://forms.gle/GwMugbAL64LHebG36
Engagement








News
SaferPlaces Third German, Spanish and Italian End-users and Stakeholders Workshops – November 2020
During the month of November 2020, SaferPlaces is organizing the third round of national workshops, aiming at supporting German, Spanish and Italian stakeholders familiarizing with the developed cloud web platform and ultimately providing them the [...]
Third Italian Saferplaces End-users and Stakeholders Workshop
Al centro del progetto SaferPlaces c’è lo sviluppo e la sperimentazione di tecniche innovative di modellistica climatica per valutare il pericolo e il rischio di inondazioni fluviali, pluviali e costiere in ambienti urbani, sia in [...]
“The climate concerns us – Future risks in Emilia-Romagna Region: knowledge and prevention”
“The climate concern us” is the title of the campaign launched by the Emilia-Romagna section of Legambiente, the most prominent and widespread environmental non-profit organization in Italy. The event aims at increasing the knowledge of [...]
Rimini and climate change: the added value of the Sea Park “Parco del Mare”
Rimini's Sea Park "Parco del Mare", photo source: Comune di Rimini The City of Rimini’s Mayor, Andrea Gnassi, and the Councilor for the Environment, Anna Montini, explain in an official news release how the urban intervention [...]
SaferPlaces Platform: watch the registration of the webinar hosted by Oasis Hub
Head over to Oasis Hub Blog for watching the registration of the first webinar of their Autumn series 2020, where SaferPlaces presented and demonstrated the recently released platform: a climate service mapping flood hazard and [...]
SaferPlaces at the Oasis Hub autumn 2020 webinar series: climate tools for cities, insurance and utilities
The unique Cloud Web Platform developed within SaferPlaces project will be the topic of the first webinar of the Oasis Hub autumn 2020 webinar series about climate adaptation and risk assessment tools for cities, insurance and [...]
Papers
Samela et al. 2020 -Safer_RAIN: A DEM-Based Hierarchical Filling-&-Spilling Algorithm for Pluvial Flood Hazard Assessment and Mapping across Large Urban Areas Water 2020, 12(6), 1514; https://doi.org/10.3390/w12061514
Paprotny et al. 2020 – Estimating exposure of residential assets to natural hazards in Europe using open data Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 323–343, 2020; https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-323-2020
Paprotny et al. 2020 – Exposure and vulnerability estimation for modelling flood losses to commercial assets in Europe, Sci. Total Environ., Vol. 737, 2020, 140011; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140011
Paprotny et al. 2020 – “BANSHEE–A MATLAB toolbox for Non-Parametric Bayesian Networks”. SoftwareX Volume 12, July–December 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2020.100588
Paprotny et al. 2020 – A probabilistic approach to estimating residential losses from different flood types, Natural Hazards (December 2020); https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11069-020-04413-x
Persiano et al. 2020 – Changes in seasonality and magnitude of sub-daily rainfall extremes in Emilia-Romagna (Italy) and potential influence on regional rainfall frequency estimation, Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, 32, 100751; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2020.100751