Leading Researchers Join First Street Foundation Flood Lab

Researchers from the world’s top academic institutions have partnered with the nonprofit research and technology group First Street Foundation to define the impacts of increasing flood risk on the United States economy. In exchange for free access to the Foundation’s comprehensive flood risk data, experts from Johns Hopkins University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of California, Davis; the University of Georgia; the University of Texas, Austin; the University of Washington; Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam; and the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center have committed to answering some of the country’s most pressing questions about the financial, social, fiscal, and economic impacts of flood risk. As partners of the First Street Foundation Flood Lab, the researchers will analyze flooding’s impact on the U.S. housing market, its implications for lower income and minority communities, and its cost to federal, state, and local taxpayers among other issues.

While an oligopoly of for-profit firms sell detailed flood risk data to large financial institutions and insurance companies, researchers have limited, if any, access to this kind of data. The First Street Foundation Flood Model will be shared with Flood Lab partners for free to allow for critical public analysis. Through transparent, peer-reviewed methodologies, the Flood Model will be the first publicly available, comprehensive flood risk model of its kind, defining the past, present, and future risk of individual homes and properties across the United States. As the data is generated, it will be given to researchers on a rolling basis through an Application Programming Interface (API). When the First Street Foundation Flood Model is complete, the information will be shared directly with the public through the Foundation’s online visualization tool.

“By giving this data to the world’s top experts for analysis and sharing it with the public, First Street Foundation will disrupt a dangerous asymmetry of information in the United States, one that allows institutional investors and the wealthy to capitalize on the changing climate while disempowering the vast majority of Americans to protect themselves and plan for their future,” said Matthew Eby, executive director of First Street Foundation.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University will use the Flood Model to expand their research on how big banks’ may be shifting climate risk to taxpayers. They’ll also look at the potentially outsized influence real estate developers may have on Congress when determining the location and scope of seawalls, levees, and other adaptation projects built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“First Street Foundation’s data creation and analysis will unlock invaluable research potential. I am proud to partner with this innovative team of applied scientists,” said Matthew Kahn, director of Johns Hopkins University’s 21st Century Cities Initiative. “The insights we generate based on their spatial Big Data will allow us to inform public policy that protects all people from the emerging climate change crisis.”

Researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will examine the impacts of flood risk on housing and insurance markets. The Wharton team will also look at the fiscal impacts of major flood events on municipalities.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with First Street Foundation to advance social science research on the economic impacts of flood risk,” said Carolyn Kousky, Flood Lab partner and executive director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. “Flood costs continue to escalate in the U.S. and our work in partnership with the Flood Lab will help inform policy responses to this growing risk.”

A team of over 70 modelers and technologists from First Street Foundation; Columbia University; Fathom; George Mason University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rhodium Group; Rutgers University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Bristol are recreating past hurricanes and major inland flooding events to calculate the likely flood history of homes and properties across the country. They are also creating a comprehensive flood risk model to include tidal, storm surge, pluvial (rainfall), and fluvial (riverine) flood risk. This probabilistic model will define the current risk to individual homes and properties. The model will be adjusted to estimate future risk based on anticipated environmental changes like sea level rise, and warming sea surface and atmospheric temperatures.

First Street Foundation’s previous research, analyzing the impact of sea level rise on coastal housing markets, found a nearly $15.9B loss in relative home values along 18 East and Gulf Coast states from Maine to Mississippi between 2005 and 2017. The public can access the Foundation’s tidal flooding and home value data through FloodiQ.com, the Foundation’s online visualization tool. People can apply for access to the Foundation’s current and forthcoming data at FirstStreet.org/API.

About First Street Foundation
First Street Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research and technology organization working to define America’s flood risk.