REBuILD: Risk Evaluation of Brahmaputra Inundations for Loss and Damage

This is a scoping project developing the necessary framework to allow on demand, real-time attribution studies of floods in the Brahmaputra basin.

Bangladesh is listed as one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. It has one of the largest population densities in the world which results in high pressure on land and water resources in the region. When an extreme weather event such as flooding occurs, millions of people are displaced and both freshwater supply and agricultural production are affected.

This scoping project will develop the necessary framework to allow on demand, real-time attribution studies of floods in the Brahmaputra basin. The human influence on extreme weather events that lead to such floods, thereby affecting freshwater supply in Bangladesh, will be quantified. This knowledge will be used to provide inputs to the “Loss and Damage in Vulnerable Countries Initiative” initiated by the Government of Bangladesh and the Least Developed Countries. The project’s activities will develop the mechanism for real-time event definition, automated simulation ensemble launching and preliminary analysis. Building on the existing work of the Climateprediction.net and Weather@Home citizen science projects, the computational resources attached and utilised will be provided by the Google Cloud Platform. Application of the cloud will enable both scalability and costs to be determined for a future production system run by a Bangladesh Government institute such as Department of Environment or Department of Disaster Management (DDM).

The Centre is partnering with BUET, a leading Engineering University in Bangladesh in which Institute of Water and Flood Management (IWFM) is the leading research institute focusing on Integrated Water Resources development (IWRM). This Institute pursues research and capacity development in the field of water and flood management that is vital for the economic development and social prosperity of Bangladesh. Dr. AKM Saiful Islam, a Professor of IWFM of BUET, whose work on flooding within the country is internationally recognized, will be actively involved in this research project.