Consequences Solution

Consequence modeling is essential for actuarial assessments, scenario evaluations, and Benefit-Cost Analyses (BCAs). Accurate Annualized Average Loss (AAL) data supports setting insurance premiums, managing financial risks, planning for emergencies, and justifying investments in flood mitigation. FEMA requires rapid and reliable AAL estimates to improve flood damage assessments. The Consequences Solution is designed to deliver a flexible and transparent framework that meets FEMA’s needs by leveraging established methodologies to produce trusted AAL data for both coastal and inland areas.

Inland and Coastal Framework

This solution introduces a unified inland and coastal modeling framework that applies best practices and lessons learned from existing hazard and loss modeling tools. By aligning inland and coastal approaches within a single architecture, the framework enables loss calculations for both flood types using a common solution. The framework is intentionally designed to be modular, allowing individual components to be updated, extended, or replaced over time as methodologies evolve or new data sources and capabilities are introduced.

Integration with Coastal FFRD Methodology

The Consequences Solution migrates the Coastal Future of Flood Risk Data (FFRD) Average Annualized Loss Calculation Tool from R to Python, integrating its core methodology into a modular, scalable architecture.This migration facilitates continued development and performance enhancements while ensuring methodological consistency with ongoing FEMA projects.

Phased Approach to Inland Consequence

The Inland Consequences Solution enables inland flood loss modeling using depth-based hazard inputs, supporting both single-event loss calculations and multi–return-period average annualized loss (AAL) analyses. In the context of Future Flood Risk Data (FFRD), the current phase of development focuses on calculating AAL from post-processed annual exceedance probability (AEP) depth rasters and their associated velocity, duration, and uncertainty layers. A planned future enhancement is to leverage the full FFRD event catalog to support event-based loss calculations and a more comprehensive treatment of uncertainty.

Key Benefits

  • Consistency – Unified inland and coastal methodologies ensure compatibility across FEMA risk products.
  • Transparency – Open, modular framework simplifies review and reproducibility.
  • Extensibility – Supports future enhancements, such as new hazard inputs or improved structure inventories.
  • Efficiency – Modernized Python implementation reduces manual processing time and enables integration with cloud-based workflows.