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NISMOD

National Infrastructure Systems Model

The latest listing of available NISMOD starter data kits is available here:

Catalogue of NISMOD Starter Data Kits
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What's in the download?

This starter data kit collects extracts from global, open datasets relating to climate hazards and infrastructure systems. Many of them are visualised on an interactive map in the GRI Risk Viewer.

These extracts are derived from global datasets which have been clipped to the national scale (or subnational, in cases where national boundaries have been split, generally to separate outlying islands or non-contiguous regions), using Natural Earth (2023) boundaries, and is not meant to express an opinion about borders, territory or sovereignty.

Human-induced climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of climate and weather extremes. This is causing widespread, adverse impacts to societies, economies and infrastructures. Climate risk analysis is essential to inform policy decisions aimed at reducing risk. Yet, access to data is often a barrier, particularly in low and middle-income countries. Data are often scattered, hard to find, in formats that are difficult to use or requiring considerable technical expertise. Nevertheless, there are global, open datasets which provide some information about climate hazards, society, infrastructure and the economy. This "data starter kit" aims to kickstart the process and act as a starting point for further model development and scenario analysis.

Hazards:

Exposure:

The spatial intersection of hazard and exposure datasets is a first step to analyse vulnerability and risk to infrastructure and people.

To learn more about related concepts, there is a free short course available through the Open University on Infrastructure and Climate Resilience . This overview of the course has more details.

These Python libraries may be a useful place to start analysis of the data in the packages produced by this workflow:

The open-gira repository contains a larger workflow for global-scale open-data infrastructure risk and resilience analysis.

For a more developed example, some of these datasets were key inputs to a regional climate risk assessment of current and future flooding risks to transport networks in East Africa, which has a related online visualisation tool at https://east-africa.infrastructureresilience.org/ and is described in detail in Hickford et al (2023).

References