Jacobs Engineering : Helping the Environment Agency Deliver its Flood, Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy

Jacobs is providing expert support to the Environment Agency on three key national projects: National Flood Risk Management 2 (NaFRA2), Long-Term Investment Scenarios (LTIS) 2025 and National Coastal Erosion Risk Mapping 2 (NCERM2), which will ensure long-term resilience to the U.K. environment and communities.

National Flood Risk Management 2

Together with the Environment Agency, JBA Consulting and a small group of industry and academic experts, we are designing, developing and implementing the National Flood Risk Assessment 2 (NaFRA2), a pioneering cloud computing system that will help create a step-change in the quality and scope of England's national flood risk information.

Two years into the five-year project, we are progressing this important and time-sensitive effort, which will support a wide range of Environment Agency flood risk management activities - from national evidence and strategy to local community, property and asset-level risk information. NaFRA2 will bring together vast quantities of diverse data - modelling, properties, terrain and third-party data - to tell a coherent story about risk at any scale and anywhere in England. As well as the richness of the data and breadth of scenarios represented by NaFRA2, it is differentiated by being a live system that will continue to be updated with new data and methods to meet the evolving needs of its users. We are engaging with the Agency and its wide base of users as key stakeholders to ensure that the system and its data can be intuitively accessed to meet a broad range of business needs. Although we are used to working on complex projects, this is a unique combination of challenging scalable data manipulation, cutting edge method implementation, user-focused design and national-scale flood modelling. Considerations of how this tool can stand the test of time, making it usable in decades to come to help manage flood risk, including from climate change impacts, are at the heart of this work.

"As an organization, the Environment Agency has always been very good at producing numerous models and data nationally and locally," says Environment Agency Project Executive Ben Lukey. "NaFRA2 is going to help us make much better use of what we have, providing for the first time a mechanism for selecting the right model outputs to provide the best flood risk information for any location. Two years into the project, it's brilliant to now see early prototypes of the interface emerging. I'm particularly excited to be able to show users how we'll be able to share information about future flood risk as climate change starts to have a serious impact, to give everyone a chance to adapt to increasing flood risks and build resilience."