Pearl: Preparing for Extreme and Rare Events in Coastal Regions

The main goal of PEARL is to develop adaptive, sociotechnical risk management measures and strategies for coastal communities against extreme hydro-meteorological events minimising social, economic and environmental impacts and increasing the resilience of Coastal Regions in Europe. PEARL brings together world-leading expertise in hydro-engineering and in risk reduction and management services to pool knowledge and practical experience.

The approach

To achieve its main goal, PEARL adopts a holistic risk management approach, based on the following three premises:

• Risk management is a socio-technical process, which cannot be studied by separating social and technical processes and designing them in isolation.
• The relationships between the parts are mutual, emergent, dynamic and nonlinear and are guided by the self-organising capacities of each part and the (unpredictable) dynamics of their co-evolution.
• The process of strengthening any kind of flood risk mitigation measure (such as forecasting, prediction and early warning capabilities) should be understood and studied within the context of the larger flood management process which depends on interactions with other sub-processes at different levels.

The PEARL consortium consists of 24 international parties and 12 case studies in Europe, Caribbean and Asia.

The role of HydroLogic

In this project HydroLogic is developing back-end services for the HydroNET platform in order to process results from 2D flood hazard and risk models. The model manager service integrates connectors and web services within the overall Perl platform for exchanging the needed data required for the hydrodynamic simulation models, such as Mike Flood from DHI. Finally an Android-based mobile app is setup for the citizens and stakeholders to be used for dissemination of flood warnings and interactive presentation of flood hazard maps.

This project received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under Grant Agreement No. 603663.