We are proud to announce that SaferPlaces is now providing high-resolution pluvial flood risk data to ARUP and Climada Technologies, giving both organizations a sharper lens on how heavy rainfall could impact assets, infrastructure, and communities around the world. By enriching them with more granular hazard inputs, teams working on climate risk gain a clearer view of where vulnerabilities lie, and how those risks may shift under future climate scenarios.

Why Pluvial Flooding Demands Attention

Pluvial flooding, meaning surface flooding caused by intense rainfall, remains one of the most frequently underestimated climate hazards. It occurs when heavy rain overwhelms drainage systems or saturates the ground, and it can affect areas far from rivers or coastlines. Dense urban environments and sloped terrain are particularly susceptible, where even short bursts of rainfall can trigger disruptive and costly flooding.

Traditional flood models often underrepresent pluvial hazards. SaferPlaces addresses this gap by combining high-quality topography, land-use patterns, runoff behavior, and drainage capacity to generate detailed maps that capture how rainfall actually moves across a landscape.

Strengthening Climate Risk Analysis

Climada Technologies, known for its science-driven, open-core approach to climate risk analytics, now integrates also SaferPlaces’ datasets for precise asset-level flood assessments, loss quantification, and scenario modelling under varying climate pathways.

Global engineering consultancy ARUP applies SaferPlaces’ data to complement its existing suite of hazard assessments. The added pluvial detail can strengthen its hazard assessments, enabling flood-resilient design guidance, improved alignment with climate projections, and integration of probabilistic rainfall flooding into planning and resilience strategies.

A Practical Boost for Projects and Investments

Access to higher-resolution flood information gives clients a more reliable basis for decision-making. With these datasets, stakeholders can:

  • Pinpoint exposure to intense rainfall at scales ranging from individual buildings to entire districts
  • Strengthen due diligence for infrastructure investments, financing, and insurance analyses
  • Identify and prioritize mitigation measures, such as green infrastructure or drainage upgrades, based on localized flood behavior
  • Improve climate risk disclosures and meet evolving regulatory and ESG reporting requirements.

As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall, understanding pluvial flood risk is becoming critical: our goal is to deliver the type of precise and actionable information needed to build resilience in a rapidly changing world.