Communities in coastal Louisiana are facing more frequent and severe flooding as the climate changes. To help local governments prepare for these challenges, we developed a new modeling approach that connects future climate data with tools that simulate flood damage and its financial impact. Our method uses open-source platforms—R2D, BRAILS, and IN-CORE—to build realistic flood scenarios and estimate how they would affect buildings and city budgets.

First, we take climate projections showing how rainfall and storms might change by 2050 under different levels of greenhouse gas emissions. These are used to create flood maps, which are then fed into R2D to simulate how deep the water would get and what damage it would cause. We use BRAILS, an artificial intelligence tool, to fill in missing details about buildings (like number of stories or roof type) to improve the accuracy of damage estimates. Finally, we use IN-CORE to estimate how much cities could lose in property taxes or face in recovery costs if these floods occur.

This toolchain helps identify which areas are most at risk and what the future might look like under different climate futures. It’s a powerful way to support fair and forward-looking planning in flood-prone communities.