The 25th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP25) starts next week in Madrid, Spain. The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance will be there to remind policy makers of the commitments made during the Climate Action Summit and the importance of further, more ambitious, investments in disaster risk reduction, particularly […]

While Australia and the USA are battling extreme heat and wild fires other parts of the world are inundated by rain and battling severe flooding, including communities in the United Kingdom. What needs to happen at the global scale and what can be done closer to home to build resilience against floods in a changing […]

This blog captures the key recommendations for the United Nations Seventh Asia-Pacific Urban Forum (APUF-7) from the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance’s session on the importance of transboundary action and inclusive governance in building urban flood resilience. 

Nowadays, it is difficult to imagine any ‘serious’ conversation on disaster risk reduction (DRR) that doesn’t emphasise the importance of local communities, their participation and their local knowledge. Global policies, including the Sendai Framework and Paris Agreement, clearly point out that local knowledge has a role to play in reducing risks and adapting to change. […]

A major challenge in understanding community flood resilience is the lack of an empirically validated measure of it. To plug this gap the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA) developed the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC). In the first phase of the Alliance we applied the FRMC tool in 118 communities in nine different countries. This is what […]

To increase efforts to respond to increasing risk it is vital to ensure that flood resilience building is central to national governments efforts to tackle the climate crisis. The UNFCCC mandated five year action plans that document national commitments to climate action the aptly named Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) are a great opportunity to do […]

This Sunday, the 13th of October, is the 30th International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction (IDDRR). An initiative started by the UN General Assembly in 1989 in order to promote a global culture of disaster risk reduction. This year the theme is ‘Build to Last’. 

Several years ago, we identified flood forecasts as a unique opportunity to improve people’s lives, and began looking into how Google’s infrastructure and machine learning expertise can help in this field. Last year, we started our flood forecasting pilot in the Patna region, and since then we have expanded our flood forecasting coverage, as part […]

Finding positive takeaways from a catastrophe loss can be tough, but analyzing how a natural event became a humanitarian disaster can help communities build resilience against future catastrophes.