Spatial surge forecasting using artificial intelligence and community knowledge (SURF-IT)

 

This project will look at coastal embankments in southwest coastal regions of Bangladesh that often fail to protect the community against storm surges during cyclones of tropical depressions. These surges cause humanitarian crises that continue to affect women, elders and lower-mobility people in a disproportional way.

Using a variety of methods that include the adaptation to local climate, morphology and socio-economic contexts of a robust predictive model driven by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the research will inform and support the development of impact-based forecasts of water surge levels in selected inland tidal estuaries of the coastal areas of Bangladesh, with the option of scaling it nation-wide. The project will also investigate the conditions for the new protocols to be made operational by national authorities, and the conditions for their activation to truly benefit vulnerable groups, including those groups involved in their design and testing.

Those forecasts promise to significantly improve the existing early action protocols to reduce the impact of the surge on coastal people, especially on women and vulnerable groups, benefitting more than half a million people by the end of the project and up to millions of people in the long term, if scaled nation-wide.

This project is part of the Climate Adaptation and Resilience initiative (CLARE) co-funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and IDRC. CLARE is a five-year, CAD120-million initiative that aims to enable inclusive and sustainable action to build resilience to climate change and natural hazards for people across Africa and the Asia-Pacific.