Flood risk indicators (and other non-beneficial aspects of urban environments)

[carlhiggs]

During a meeting on 21 September 2022 with BGC, ER, CH and Finnish researchers Vuokko Heikenheimo and Linda Karjalainen, Linda made the suggestion to consider including non-beneficial indicators -- specifically, what about flood risk? We all agreed this was a good idea, for example, flood risk maps are retrievable as open data and could be used as a map overlay, and perhaps cross-referenced with municipal flood mitigation policies/strategies. @eugenrb shared a link to one site hosting open data on flood risk https://global-flood-database.cloudtostreet.ai , 'Global Flood Database' -- which is associated with a paper in Nature: Tellman, B., Sullivan, J.A., Kuhn, C. et al. Satellite imaging reveals increased proportion of population exposed to floods. Nature 596, 80–86 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03695-w

An indicator like this should be quite do-able, and raises questions about other natural hazards for urban environments, which might be able to be aligned with mitigation policies --- landslide and earthquake risk and preparedness, bushfire (?), even air pollution (in experience, NO2 correlates strongly with walkability!)