To main content

Stormwater-related databases – Review and Recommendations

Abstract

Floods and stormwater events are the costliest natural catastrophes. Costs are expected to increase due to urbanization and climate change. Mitigation is needed, and is already ongoing in certain cases. Different stakeholders with different motivations unfortunately often evaluate vulnerability by using fragmented and incomplete data sources. This report intends to review the different approaches for collecting and analysing data, and to evaluate their usefulness within the proposed framework for a "smart" use of data.

The objectives of this work have been:
- to describe a selection of event-based databases related to floods,
- to review qualitatively and quantitatively a selection of national object-based
databases,
- to evaluate the current Norwegian situation and to propose measures for
improvement.

This study has shown that data are spread around a heterogeneous community of stakeholders concerned with different motivations, different needs, and different levels of data processing. In general, the needs of the different stakeholders have not been surveyed and defined systematically enough. Regarding international flood databases, there is still a substantial demand for a standardized and systematic collection of flood damage data with clearly defined and documented procedures. Regarding national stormwater-related inventory databases, there is a substantial potential in upgrading from the delivery of passive raw data to the delivery of knowledge-driven decision-support tools.

Further work should aim at:
‐ Exploiting more efficiently available sources of data and exploring alternative sources of data,‐ Achieving a more efficient transformation of data into knowledge via the development of analytical tools that match the identified needs of relevant end-users by efficiently processing several relevant sources of data, ‐ Providing ergonomic and user-friendly digital solutions to support workers in their daily tasks and to efficiently document the actions within the system, and ‐ Triggering the implementation of evaluation processes within the national agencies for business purposes, and at a national scale for providing the policymakers with useful knowledge about the societal risks associated with climate changes. Technical challenges can relatively easily be solved by digitization and its opportunities for improvement of the workflow and for higher quality of data. Organisational challenges must be solved by an end-users-focused approach to identify needs and expectations. The task WP2.1 intends to be a catalyser within Klima 2050 project for triggering a global data-driven evaluation system to provide policymakers with knowledge on societal risk associated with climate change, and for strengthening national agencies and private companies' innovation capacity for addressing climatic changes.
Read publication

Category

Report

Client

  • Research Council of Norway (RCN) / 237859

Language

English

Author(s)

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Community / Architecture, Materials and Structures

Year

2017

Publisher

SINTEF akademisk forlag

Issue

6

ISBN

978-82-536-1541-7

View this publication at Cristin