Flood specialist JBA Risk Management has launched an enhanced version of its Global Flood Model, which introduces a variety of key features, such as enhanced hazard maps, a wide range of future climate event sets, and improvements to both processing speed and exposure disaggregation.
JBA Risk Management’s new global flood model includes updated maps for 17 key countries (Hungary, Japan, China, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Poland, Slovakia, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, South Korea, South Africa), incorporating newly available bare earth Digital Terrain Model data, as well as refreshed hydrology aligned with JBA’s latest global methodology, updated land use information, and improved classification of river and surface water flood types.
The model also contains enhanced and expanded future climate event sets, which includes eight CMIP6‑based climate event sets, with a new 2080 timeline and two hours clauses, which ultimately helps to provide better flexibility for exploring how flood risk may evolve.
Furthermore, JBA Risk Management also confirmed that the flood model has faster and improved disaggregation based on global building footprints, and administrative boundary updates reflecting evolving geopolitical changes.
“In creating climate-conditioned event sets, JBA’s scientifically robust method applies global climate model-derived change factors to the underlying hydrological time series to generate new events, rather than scaling present-day events. This approach alters event frequency, magnitude and spatial coherence in line with projected climate signals, enabling structured exploration of how flood risk may evolve under different warming pathways,” JBA Risk Management said.
JBA Risk Management also noted that the model’s newly developed exposure disaggregation framework delivers improved placement accuracy within building footprints, excludes water bodies, parks, and unsuitable land cover, and facilitates quicker processing.
The model is supported by the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework, which guarantees its availability across various platforms such as Oasis, Verisk Model Exchange, and Elements from Aon’s Impact Forecasting team.
David Wood, managing director, JBA Risk Management, commented: “Our new Global Flood Model’s enhanced functionality, built on our market leading flood maps, enables our clients around the world to fully understand their flood exposure.
“They can now easily, and quickly, undertake ‘what if’ investigations based on their own needs, see the impacts on their losses under a range of scenarios, and fully understand individual and portfolio risk profiles.”
