Practical Action and Zurich Insurance launch Flood Resilience Portal

During World Water Week (28 August – 2 September), Practical Action, in partnership with the Zurich Insurance Group, is launching an online Flood Resilience Portal to provide essential information and practical solutions for flooding around the world.

Flooding affects more people globally every year than any other kind of disaster and the portal will be a space for civil society organisations and local government field staff to share innovation, knowledge and successful practices in building vulnerable people’s resilience to floods.

Sachin Sapkota, Practical Action Nepal, said: “There is huge amount of information available online, predominantly in the wider disaster risk reduction (DRR) field. But there is a gap in the standardisation and management of the available knowledge. The Flood Resilience Portal aims to fill this gap by giving those people who need it most the right information at the right time.”

The portal will help practitioners to identify challenges and match them with solutions through:

Methodologies and tool kits;

Summaries of current research on flood resilience with key recommendations;

Case-studies of best practices in building community-level flood resilience;

Locally-relevant, contextualized information.

The Flood Resilience Portal is an outcome of the Zurich Global Flood Resilience Alliance, a unique interdisciplinary partnership comprising Practical Action, the Zurich Insurance Group, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Wharton Business School’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Centre (Wharton).

The Alliance brings together flood research, community-based programmes, and risk expertise with the aim of creating a comprehensive approach that will help to promote community flood resilience. It seeks to improve the public dialogue around flood resilience by demonstrating the benefits of pre-event risk reduction, as opposed to post-event disaster relief.

David Nash, Zurich Foundation Manager, said: “If we are to shift the focus from post-event recovery towards building resilience in the face of floods, knowledge about what works is vital. We are committed to getting that knowledge and information to people in the field who can really use it. We are confident that the Flood Resilience Portal will make a significant impact on the lives of people as they build resilience to devastating floods around the world.”