Decision Support Linking Risk and Resilience

The Mitigation Evaluation and Risk Reduction Investment Tool (MERIT) is an end-to-end, web-based platform to help community-level end users apply flood risk analysis to investment prioritization to improve resilience and reduce risk, without requiring any specialized experience in flood modeling.

Despite the fact that floods are the most frequent and costly natural disasters in the US, communities lack comprehensive tools to rapidly assess their flood risk and prioritize investments to mitigate that risk and increase resilience. To bridge this gap, Talus designed and built a web-based decision support tool that allows users to assess flood risk, choose a short-list of priorities from among the flood impacts to infrastructure and the community population, and compare investments based on their predicted benefits in mitigating impacts and enhancing resilience to future floods. MERIT provides the technical tools and common platform to help community planners, local leaders, and Federal partners to make informed investment decisions by linking risk assessment across a range of flood severities to flood mitigation and resilience enhancement efforts.

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