Flood mapping technology has undergone extensive change over the past two decades. As a relatively new risk management tool, insurers are still working on how to refine and best utilize flood maps in a space that is constantly evolving.
Simon Waller, executive chair at JBA Risk Management, explained that in the mid-90s the UK began engaging with flood mapping but in Canada, it only became a larger point of interest after major flooding in 2013.
Read more: Updated flood maps coming to Canada?
“You can’t produce a flood map for any country without knowing the liable land,” said Waller. “Digital terrain technology, spaceborne technology and airborne technology that is often born out of military use have enabled us to start thinking about things beyond a few square kilometres.”
JBA has been working on taking traditional technology that used to be applied on a small scale and applying the same technology on a massive scale without losing detail.
“There’s a balance between how much detail we have and how technology allows us to enhance what we can do,” Waller mentioned. “We have three technological strategies that have been game changers for us.”
Among those is extra-terrestrial intelligence, which has positively influenced the download and assessment of space signals, allowing JBA to scale up, applying flood models across hundreds of computers at once. This method was something that had not been applied in the industry before, Waller claimed.
JBA also investigated gaming technology and used the advancement in graphics cards to accelerate processing speeds. Then came the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to boost predictive modelling.
“We can take decades of experience and train models to replace some of the manual, human made decisions we used to rely on,” said Waller. “We had large teams of people looking at millions of kilometres of flood models and mapping outputs, whereas now we can train computers to have a consistent view.”
Now, JBA is able to automatically check the output of flood maps and identify flood defence methods across a country in a matter of hours. Having the power to look at several different climate scenarios and different time zones in turn provides Canadian insurers with a faster and more flexible risk management approach.
“We are finding that the demand of the industry is growing massively, therefore we have to innovate to answer pressing questions,” Waller noted.
Judith Ellison, modelling manager at JBA Risk Management, highlighted how the mapping can be crucial in situations such as the recovery from the ongoing flood catastrophe in British Columbia.
“Insurers can use our maps to get more reflective pricing and set premiums according to risk, as well as communicating the level of risk to those who need to know,” said Ellison. “It’s thinking about how to incentivize risk reduction and what can be done to have risk reflective pricing.”
In a Canadian Voices Report last year, only 6% of respondents interviewed knew they lived in a flood risk area, and 81% said they never reviewed a flood map for their community. Insurers need to get in front of this gap and strategize how to best communicate risk to clients. According to Ellison, providing clients with a risk score is a simple solution to help them understand their risk profile.
However, the work for insurers does not stop there.
“Another area where they can assist is helping lobby for improved adaption and public infrastructure,” said Ellison. “The industry can work together with the government to make sure that the infrastructure is being built where it’s most needed and it’s very clear from the recent flood events that there’s more work to be done.”
