The future of hazard mapping(…?)

FYI – I getting the feeling that the outside industry is outpacing FEMA products, whereby, their non-regulatory products will become obsolete.   

I attended a NEMA Webinar earlier this week on yet another flood risk assessment technology from the firm FloodMapp whose products are designed to provide states/locals “Flood Intelligence”  — aka situational awareness:

  • Forecast (Real-time intelligence that answers the question “where is it going to flood tomorrow?)
  • NowCast (Live flood mapping that answers the question “where is it flooding right now?”)
  • PostCast (Flood extent data that answers the question “what was impacted by the flood?”)

The NEMA webinar also had the Chief Resilience Officer for Norfolk, VA, who discussed how the community uses this FloodMapp product in their CRS program.  They also signed up  w/ the Waze app to re-route drivers away from road hazards (“Turn around / don’t Drown” ). Waze uses Norfolk’s FloodMapp data.

Between firms like First Street Foundation, FloodMapp, others (e.g.: CoreLogic, Esri – probably a sizeable list…), and FEMA, there is a growing supply of the kind of info to help communities to identify their hazard risks. The ‘winner’ will be the one that has the right mix of well-communicated science and granular data that becomes publicly accepted and can ‘make the argument’ in the arena of state/local politics and in the courts (or vice-versa). 

Taken to its next logical step:  If these products are increasingly useful and used to better define a communities’ land use requirements, then that makes NFIP ins. maps(FIRMs) irrelevant – especially since FEMA uses Risk Rating 2.0 to determine ins. rates.

Thus, will FEMA need to spend $400 mil annually on RiskMAP and FIRMs?

For future consideration in this portfolio space… 

Article: Watch New Zealand MP’s ‘Absolutely Brilliant’ 80-Second Takedown of GDP

Watch New Zealand MP’s ‘Absolutely Brilliant’ 80-Second Takedown of GDP https://flip.it/7NhS9w

Ive long had a dim view of this metric. IMHO, it’s simply ‘single-entry accounting’ — ‘”That baseline measure of just those transactions does not give us any meaningful insight into the value of those transactions, whether we actually want them in the first place, whether they actually benefit people and the planet, nor the distribution of those transactions—that is, who benefits from those transactions.”‘

Thinking about it another way: disaster response and recovery activities (debris removal, search/rescue, victim recovery, reconstruction, .. ) are all positive expenditures in the GDP ledger.

And GDP does not calculate any ‘debits’ — eg – when crime increases in a community, the response is to spend more on police and personal security, etc. All these drive GDP up, but is your quality of life in your community better?