Tackling social vulnerability with our Digital Talent Programme
This six-month programme runs once a year and focuses on helping people across our organisation bring new digital concepts to life. It provides a space for our expert workforce to collaborate, learn new skills, and meet new people while furthering the digitalisation of our business.
The 2024 programme, with the theme of “data driven”, saw 42 participants come up with ten new solutions that can improve our insight and capabilities in different areas.
These included a global flood model builder, a tool to automate the microscopic analysis of sludge for water treatment, and another to automate geotechnical reporting.
As well as a great exercise in upskilling and exploring ideas, the programme plays a vital role in developing the services we offer. Once it comes to an end, these tools are often further developed and used either internally or as part of our work with clients.
“This is a programme for enthusiasts who don’t necessarily have digital skills but want to learn new things and bring their ideas to life,” says Elżbieta Zdebel, Urban Resilience Consultant at Royal HaskoningDHV. “At the beginning of the programme we had 42 people at very different levels of digital capabilities but with really good ideas – and we’ve been able to explore them together.”
Driving social equity with a tool for spatial equality
One of the ideas that came out of this year’s event has led to a new approach to identifying social inequality for our clients.
Social issues are something we always try to consider in projects. However, a lack of tangible data into which groups are most adversely affected by issues like climate disasters, and where social vulnerabilities lie, can make it hard to gain insight and identify tangible actions.
“We talk a lot about how important social aspects are, but we often don’t have the tools to address them. Data in terms of social demographics is very scarce and never detailed enough to pinpoint where exactly vulnerable people live” says Mila van Druten, Climate Risk consultant at Royal HaskoningDHV. “We wanted to create a solution that would provide insight into social analysis, without costing too much, as many of the regions we work in have restricted budgets.”
The result was a tool capable of identifying communities which have poor access to critical infrastructure, such as hospitals, schools, and public services. Although we cannot say much about the demographics of these people, we can use open source data to analyse the infrastructural poverty which contributes to social vulnerability.
By protecting those most vulnerable, we can take the largest steps in enhancing our entire society’s resilience to climate change. That’s why these insights are so important.
Creating a map of vulnerable locations
Using OpenStreetMap data, the tool enables us to examine road networks and identify the areas that will be most affected by road disruptions during disastrous events – and which could be entirely cut off from key resources and services.
Once we have identified the areas at risk of being cut off, we can examine the demographics of those places to see where social vulnerabilities lie.
The tool’s intuitive interface allows us to simulate the impacts of different events, and select which critical infrastructure and services we want to incorporate.
Armed with this information, we can help our clients make more informed decisions for climate adaptation projects. That could be updating road networks to provide alternative routes, moving the location of critical infrastructure, or planning future developments to provide greater social equity.
Ultimately, this can help address the uneven distribution of resources and services across different areas, such as healthcare, welfare, public services, and more.
