Throwing light on global river flooding at the Gartner Analytics and BI Showfloor Showdown 2023

Lumin uncovered the root causes of global and regional river flooding and discovered some potential reasons for optimism at the Analytics and BI Show Floor Showdown at the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in Orlando, Florida

As they do every year, Gartner invited innovative vendors in the BI and analytics space to work on publicly available datasets and showcase how their products can uncover deep insights to help solve real-world problems. The Showdown provides summit attendees an opportunity to see analytics and BI tools being applied in a controlled, consistent setting via a demonstration of product capabilities. Following Lumin’s compelling analysis of Global Sustainability Trends at last year’s summit, we were selected again this year to present at the Gartner A&BI showdown in Orlando, the topic being “Flooding and Reasons for Optimism”

Lumin’s demonstration was once again presented by Ashish Rishi, the Chief Product Officer at Fosfor. Ashish took the attendees through a Lumin analysis of global and regional river flooding, identified the majorly impacted areas and studied the human impacts of this flooding. Lumin also uncovered certain reasons for optimism shown by the reduction in casualties per flooding event over the last decade or so.

You can watch the full demo video here or scroll down to read the synopsis.

Preparing our data for Analysis

Data preparation doesn’t have to be painful or time-consuming. This section laid out how flooding data from varied datasets such as the OECD River and Coastal Flooding, OECD Precipitation, Land Use and others were consumed by Lumin using its native connectivity to Snowflake. From this point, a low-code, no-code configuration process allowed us to set up the entire spectrum of analytics on Lumin from descriptive to diagnostic to predictive in a matter of minutes.

Analysis of River Flooding

Sadly, it is no longer a surprise to turn on the news and see catastrophic flooding engulf many parts of the world on a recurring basis, taking the lives of many and displacing many more. For Lumin’s analysis, we picked up the often-impacted region of South Asia and the Indian subcontinent to understand river flooding trends. Here are some of the key insights Lumin uncovered:

Within South Asia, India has the highest impacted population from river flooding over the past 5 years, with 42 million people being impacted.
When looking at the drivers behind river floods in India, Lumin noted some very interesting factors. While heavy rainfall is the biggest driver, the growth of artificial surface cover such as roads and buildings, coupled with the decrease in vegetation cover is exacerbating flooding.
With India urbanizing at a rapid pace, a quick simulation on Lumin revealed that continued artificial surface cover growth would expose another 0.2% of the land area or 6,500 Sq Km to river floods over five years.
Looking at the specific regions in India, the densely populated states of Bihar and West Bengal have been worst hit over the years, with 17 million people exposed to flooding in Bihar in just 1 year.
From a casualties per event or mortality angle however, there is some cause for optimism with this number reducing in India over the years. Using Lumin’s connected insights capability, the “why” behind this decline was also identified as reduced number of flooding events and flooding duration in densely and moderately populated regions.

Sharing and Collaboration

Discovering insights is great but sharing them with colleagues and collaborating in the decision-making process is what brings it all together. Ashish showcased the different methods by which any insights can be shared seamlessly on Lumin.

Firstly, any insight can be shared through PDF and PPT export. Lumin also supports the download of the underlying data that powers the solution.
Additionally, Lumin by itself shares insights with users through nudges. Nudges detect anomalies in the underlying data and alerts users in-app and through emails.
Users can also set up personalized thresholds for their metrics to ensure any breach is caught early.

Data storytelling

Telling contextual and compelling stories with data is key to persuasion. With Lumin’s workspaces, data storytelling is made easy and collaborative for all users, who can comment and share these in-app and via live links with all colleagues. Ashish guided the audience through a story around the human impacts of flooding in India. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from this story.

	In the last 5 years, 80% of flooding casualties have come from just 4 states in India.
	Interestingly, sparsely populated states have had higher mortality rates from flooding in the last 10 years.
	It comes as no surprise that casualties are strongly correlated with the number of heavy rain events that occurred.
	Looking at trends, it is positive to note that overall casualties have broadly declined from 2010, although 2015 and 2017 saw spikes.
	When we pick up 2015 as an example, we can see that the growth in casualties that year came from densely populated states while casualties actually declined in sparsely populated areas.
	While overall trends seem positive, it is important to remember that thousands of people are still displaced every year and there’s a lot of work to be done.

Seamless Search Experience for all Users, Everywhere

Just like before, the last segment of the presentation is tailored toward showcasing cool and innovative capabilities in the product. Ashish highlighted the seamless search experience enhancements that have been made on Lumin and how Lumin is made available everywhere.

Through Lumin’s solution guide, users can easily explore the solution that has been configured for them as well as build their first set of analyses with Lumin’s help. Lumin further assists its users through its Intelligent search assist to ensure validity and completeness of all questions. All of this results in the most meaningful and relevant insights to the user’s questions and ensuring that their curiosity is satisfied.

Conclusion

In just 12 minutes, we covered how a complex subject such as Global and Regional River flooding could be broken down and analyzed in depth, and how all uncovered insights could be used to fuel decision making and collaboration among users.

We are happy to have participated in the A&BI Show floor Showdown for the second year running and to showcase how products such as Lumin really help transform curiosity into limitless, actionable insight!

If you are interested to know how you can uncover hidden insights in your data using Lumin, book a meeting with our experts or shoot a note to info@fosfor.com.