Your classifications help quantify real economic losses from floods in Bangladesh, supporting recovery planning and international climate finance for vulnerable communities.
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FloodEcon is designed to transform flood imagery into concrete economic evidence. It mobilizes a global community of volunteers to classify pre- and post-flood satellite imagery, generating rapid, granular, and open-access economic damage datasets that bypass the limitations of traditional assessment methods.
Learn moreFloodEcon has three workflows that together map flood impacts. In Pre-Flood Land Use, you identify what existed before flooding (homes, farms, roads, water). In Post-Flood Damage, you assess visible damage and inundation. In Sector Classification, you label affected economic sectors. New volunteers should begin with Pre-Flood Land Use.
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Research, to me, is not just about discovering facts; it is about turning evidence into dignity, policy into justice, and data into real change for the communities that need it most.
EmonAbout FloodEcon: Mapping the Economic Footprint of Climate Disasters
Bangladesh experiences approximately US $1 billion in flood-related economic losses each year, with the August 2024 floods alone causing US $1.676 billion in direct multi-sector damage. Despite the scale and frequency of these disasters, conventional post-disaster economic assessments remain slow, costly, expert-dependent, and institutionally fragmented. Consequently, damage data often arrives too late to guide recovery decisions and remains too coarse to support credible claims for international climate finance mechanisms such as the COP28 Loss and Damage Fund.
FloodEcon addresses this critical evidence gap by crowdsourcing the classification of satellite imagery (Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2) across flood-affected regions of Bangladesh. Through structured volunteer workflows—identifying pre-flood land use, assessing post-flood damage severity, and classifying affected economic sectors—the project generates a rigorous, geospatially explicit, open-access dataset of flood-related economic impacts.
By linking disaster science with climate-finance analytics, FloodEcon transforms remote sensing observations into policy-relevant economic evidence, enabling faster recovery planning, improved loss attribution, and stronger, verifiable claims for climate finance. In doing so, the project equips vulnerable communities and decision-makers with the granular damage intelligence urgently needed in an era of intensifying climate risk.