Can you describe the inception of SaferPlaces? What motivated you to focus on this specific challenge within the climate tech and safety sector?
SaferPlaces originates from a research project founded by EIT ClimateKIC with the goal of improving the assessment of flood risk in European cities. Some members of our team have been working for more than 20 years on topics such as natural hazard modeling, hydrodynamics, geospatial data, climate services, and disaster risk reduction strategies. With the increasing availability of climate, satellite and geospatial data, we saw an opportunity to innovate and to bring our expertise to a larger audience, by making flood risk data and actionable insights that come from this data more accessible, to avoid economic losses and save human lives.
SaferPlaces offers a Digital Twin SaaS platform and API DaaS; can you elaborate on how these technologies work and the unique benefits they offer to your clients?
SaferPlaces offers both a Digital Twin platform as Software as a Service, and an Application Programming Interface (API) as Data as a Service. The Digital Twin SaaS platform allows users to create virtual replicas of real-world urban areas by integrating various geospatial, satellite, and climate data layers. This platform enables users to conduct detailed flood hazard and damage assessments, simulate different climate scenarios, and explore mitigation measures to enhance resilience. On the other hand, the API DaaS provides access to SaferPlaces' flood risk intelligence and climate data in a few clicks, allowing seamless integration with clients' existing systems or applications. This API enables users to retrieve flood risk scores for specific locations or for the whole portfolio of assets programmatically, enhancing their decision-making processes.
These technologies offer several unique benefits to our clients. They provide users with comprehensive flood risk insights, enabling them to assess risks at a granular level for better decision-making. In addition, clients can scale their usage of SaferPlaces' services according to their needs, whether by simulation of multiple climate and mitigation scenarios through our platform or through API calls. They can access flood risk data and climate assessments in real-time, ensuring they have up-to-date information to inform their risk management strategies. Overall, these technologies empower clients to proactively manage flood risks, enhance resilience to climate hazards, and make data-driven decisions to protect assets and communities.
How does SaferPlaces' solution address the challenges of rainfall events and other climate-related risks?
SaferPlaces utilizes a comprehensive approach to risk assessment and mitigation. The system combines geospatial, satellite, and climate data with advanced flood algorithms to predict flood hazards accurately. It allows the users to assess various climate scenarios and analyze the efficacy of mitigation measures to protect against floods. Additionally, SaferPlaces offers an almost real-time and dynamic (multiple scenarios in a short time) way for mapping flood risk to support proactive decision-making also during emergencies. Through its platform, users can simulate different flood scenarios, evaluate vulnerabilities, and implement tailored resilience strategies. This integrated approach enhances preparedness, minimizes damage, and facilitates climate adaptation efforts in urban environments.
Who is the primary target audience for SaferPlaces, and how does your solution cater to the specific needs of municipalities, multiutilities, insurance, and finance sectors?
The primary target audience for SaferPlaces includes customers from both public and private sectors: municipalities and emergency authorities on one side, and insurance companies, multiutilities and financial institutions, on the other side.
For municipalities, SaferPlaces provides high-resolution flood risk intelligence through a dynamic cloud platform, a tool that allows them to improve their resilience to floods thanks to the possibility to test different mitigation and adaptation strategies covering historical and future climate scenarios. Emergency authorities benefit from SaferPlaces' ability to provide flood risk data at a granular level and in almost real-time for early warning and post-disaster analysis, while water and energy multiutilities to better manage and protect their assets in flood-prone areas. Insurance companies utilize SaferPlaces for flood risk scoring and profiling, enabling better risk selection and pricing strategies. Lastly, Financial institutions can rely on SaferPlaces for climate risk disclosure compliance and integrating our flood and climate risk data into their risk assessment models.
Could you share some data or case studies that highlight the environmental impact and effectiveness of SaferPlaces in real-world applications?
SaferPlaces enables municipalities, urban planners, and civil protection agencies to better understand flood risks and implement appropriate mitigation measures. It facilitates more efficient resource allocation by providing accurate flood risk assessments and climate projections. We allow stakeholders to prioritize investments in flood protection infrastructure, mitigation and adaptation measures (like green infrastructure, physical barriers or water tanks), emergency response planning, and sustainable development initiatives, leading to more effective use of resources and minimized impact.
For example, the Municipality of Rimini used our platform to support the design of a green nature-based solution that regenerated the sea-promenade into a park, with the final aim to protect the city from coastal flooding. With our platform a cost-benefit analysis was performed to show the damages that could be avoided in future climate scenarios thanks to this measure. Under extreme Sea Level Rise scenarios, the benefits of the park were particularly evident, avoiding about 65% of the expected damages in the defended scenarios compared to the undefended one. To describe another real-world application, the civil protection of the Italian region Emilia-Romagna used our platform during the extreme floods that hit the region in May 2023 for early-warning and evacuation of people. After the emergency, the platform was also used to quickly assess the extent of the flooded area and estimate the damages (which amounted to a total of approximately 8.8M euros), in order to start requesting funds to begin reconstruction.
What are the main competitive advantages of SaferPlaces over other solutions in the market? How does your technology stand out in terms of accuracy, usability, and impact?
Compared to other solutions in the market, SaferPlaces provides global coverage, solving the needs of those investing and operating globally, with the ability to provide information at high resolution within a dynamic platform. It allows the user to simulate multiple scenarios related to both climate and mitigation/adaptation measures through a cloud-based platform instead of offering only a single layer/scenario. Secondly, it is cost effective, requiring low computing power or significant pre-existing expertise, thanks to its intuitive graphical user interface.
Overall, SaferPlaces stands out in terms of its accuracy, usability, and impact, offering a comprehensive solution for flood risk assessment and climate resilience that addresses the specific needs of its users. In terms of accuracy, SaferPlaces leverages cutting-edge flood algorithms and high-resolution data to provide precise flood risk assessments. By creating digital twins of cities and incorporating detailed spatial data, SaferPlaces offers unparalleled accuracy in identifying flood-prone areas and assessing potential risks to assets and populations. Concerning usability, SaferPlaces is characterized by a user-friendly interface: the platform features clear visualization tools, customizable dashboards, and step-by-step wizards for creating digital twins and conducting simulations. Lastly, SaferPlaces delivers tangible impacts by empowering municipalities, urban planners, insurance companies, and other stakeholders to make informed decisions that enhance resilience to climate risks and minimize the impacts of flooding.
Engaging with stakeholders is crucial for climate tech startups. Could you share insights on how stakeholders have responded to your solution, and what feedback you've received?
SaferPlaces has received positive responses from stakeholders across various sectors, public and private. Users have praised SaferPlaces for its effectiveness in providing actionable insights and facilitating evidence-based decision-making. By leveraging advanced flood algorithms and high-resolution data, the platform enables users to accurately assess flood risks and develop targeted mitigation strategies. Two aspects particularly valued were the high resolutions of results and the fast flood risk simulations time. Finally, another appreciated aspect was the user-friendliness of the interface and the intuitive workflows, which make flood risk data easy to access and analyze.
Can you discuss some of the main challenges you've encountered and how you overcame them?
Developing advanced flood hazard and damage algorithms and building a scalable and elastic cloud-based platform required overcoming technical complexities. SaferPlaces invested in research and development to design robust algorithms and optimize the platform's performance, ensuring fast and accurate results for users. An additional challenge is accessing high-quality geospatial and climate data necessary for accurate flood risk assessments. To overcome this challenge, we focused on integrating different data sources, both open and commercial data. We contacted different data providers and we are constantly working on innovative techniques for integrating and processing diverse datasets. Lastly, engaging with diverse stakeholders like municipalities, emergency authorities, insurance companies, and financial institutions posed a challenge due to varying needs and priorities. We adopted a collaborative approach, actively seeking feedback from stakeholders and tailoring the platform to address their specific requirements. Despite these challenges, our development journey is leveraging innovation, collaboration, and a deep understanding of the user needs to overcome these obstacles, with the goal to drive positive change and flood-resilience
