ICEYE, a provider of natural catastrophe solutions and insights, has described the provision of a recent parametric flood scheme for high-risk areas in New York City as a “cornerstone step” towards addressing the flood protection gap.
The cover was provided by ICEYE in conjunction with Swiss Re and Guy Carpenter to the Centre for NYC Neighborhoods (CNYCN) in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice (MOCEJ), the Environmental Defense Fund, and SBP.
The pilot project will provide up to $1.1 million in emergency funding to low-and moderate-income households in need following a major flood event.
As part of the program, ICEYE will conduct 24/7 monitoring for potential flood events using satellite imagery from its earth observation constellation, as well as data from New York City’s water sensor network, Flood Net, and precipitation forecasts, river gauges, and other open-source evidence of developments likely to cause flooding.
The firm will then conduct analysis of the data over a 5-day period before delivering its final analysis to Swiss Re to establish whether a payment will be made to the CNYCN.
CNYCN in conjunction with the NYC Mayor’s Office will then allocate that funding to eligible households in the affected neighborhoods.
“This historic program will bring critical financial support to low-income households and help the City respond decisively to flood events,” commented Andy Read, Global Head of Government Solutions at ICEYE. “This partnership represents a cornerstone step in the right direction as we seek to address a growing flood protection gap.”
“New models of disaster finance are urgently needed as the world has been too slow to adopt strong climate policies, driving up the risk of weather-related extremes,” added Carolyn Kousky, Associate Vice-President for Economics and Policy at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation grant. “Innovation takes collaboration, and ultimately, we achieve more when we work together.”
Read further stated: “The increasing frequency and severity of climate-related perils such as flood will escalate the vulnerability of low- and moderate-income communities to these devastating events. It is therefore critical that we look to innovative programs such as this that bring together the public and private sectors to enhance community resilience and ultimately reduce the protection gap.”
“We believe that scaling these flood programs to the city, state or country level will serve to stimulate increased capital market interest in supporting such ESG-driven initiatives.”
Mike Bennett, Strategic Government Account Manager at ICEYE, further stated: “To date we have not seen the increase in the use of parametric solutions for flood that we have seen for perils such as hurricane or earthquake. This is primarily due lack of accurate and comprehensive post-event data for a peril like flood. Reliance on determiners such as excess rainfall or flood modelling can lead to considerable basis risk, thus not doing as much to close the protection gap. But by providing high-resolution, accurate, consistent data in a systematic way in near real time, ICEYE helps to significantly reduce the associated basis risk and makes such parametric solutions a much more viable and effective flood resilience mechanism moving forward.”
