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Europe is having another hard and tragic summer of wildfires, with drought and heat driving evacuations across the south. The same warming behind those conditions is also what loads the atmosphere with more moisture, so the rain, when it comes, tends to come hard.
Heavy downpours overwhelm streets and drainage, and much of that damage sits outside what most flood models measure, because they were built to assess rivers and coastlines.
We spoke with Helge Jørgensen, geoscientist and co-founder of 7Analytics, about why flood modelling has been looking in the wrong places, what it takes to map risk at the level of individual buildings, and what a Norwegian climate tech company learned by proving its technology during a hurricane in Texas.
You started 7Analytics in 2020 with three co-founders across geoscience, data science, and commercial strategy. What problem did you see that no one else was solving?
In my previous job, I saw that urban flood modelling was not being done efficiently or correctly. To fully understand flood risk in cities, you need high-resolution data, both terrain and land use, because small features and elevation differences can have a big impact on the direction water takes. The problem I saw was that it's very difficult to map larger catchments at high resolution, so a lot of urban flood modelling was done using either property boundaries or a cropped dataset, not looking holistically at the full hydrological system. As a geoscientist, that struck me as simply the wrong approach. Water doesn't respect property boundaries. So we saw a real opportunity to make a difference. That was the founding problem we set out to solve with 7Analytics.
Flooding is already one of Europe's most expensive climate risks, and it's getting worse. When you look at the continent's preparedness today, where do you see the biggest gaps?
Flood modelling approaches have historically focused too much on understanding fluvial flooding, meaning river flooding, and not enough on how exposed our cities are to urban surface water flooding. Many insurance companies are essentially blind to urban flood risk. The increase in heavy precipitation events across Europe is bringing flooding into our cities more often and showing just how exposed our homes are. We need new technology to better understand and prepare for it. In the US, we know surface water flooding accounts for 40–50% of claims, yet many insurers assign very low or zero flood risk to buildings that fall outside river or coastal areas. The numbers are broadly similar in Europe, which is, in my view, exactly where we are least prepared.
If you had to explain what 7Analytics does to someone with no background in insurance or climate risk, what would you say?
With the unpredictable weather patterns we see today, heavy rainfall events hitting areas that have never flooded before, we need to better understand the flood risk at every building. Both in a short-term perspective ahead of impending events and a longer-term perspective identifying inherent vulnerability. At 7Analytics, we model flood risk all the way down to the individual building, using high-resolution terrain models calibrated with insurance claims data. That lets us identify where our cities are most exposed to extreme weather, so we can build resilience and price insurance correctly. Through integration of weather intelligence, we also provide early warnings of location-specific impact up to 72 hours ahead, enabling loss mitigation and event response.
Climate adaptation is often discussed through reports and policy frameworks. Can you give a concrete example of where 7Analytics data has actually changed a decision?
Our forecasting system has been active during US hurricanes. One example is a hospital group in Houston, Texas, that applied our solution to change how they manage and mitigate upcoming events. During Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall with Houston directly in its trajectory, the hospital was alerted 28 hours before the storm hit. They were therefore able to trigger their barrier systems, and importantly got the right personnel on site ahead of time. That allowed them to keep the hospital fully operational throughout the storm despite all access roads being blocked.
You've built the company from Bergen and are now selling into the US market. What have you learned about the differences in how European and American customers think about climate risk?
The US is a more mature market when it comes to using natural hazard risk data. That's largely down to how insurance is structured. Flood risk is insured as a separate policy, so property owners have to make an active choice to insure against it. The US has also historically been hit by more natural catastrophe events, so insurers and asset owners have over a long timeframe integrated the operational risk. That combination has made the market more attuned to deploying the type of risk data and solutions we provide. But after the recent years' major flood disasters in Europe, and the rising share of insurer losses that flooding now accounts for, we are now clearly seeing a growing interest and prioritisation across European markets as well.
There is a growing argument that the technologies Europe needs for climate resilience are just as strategically important as those in defence or AI. As a European climate tech founder, how do you see your own and 7Analytics' role in that broader picture?
I think that argument is right, and it's overdue. Climate resilience matters because we have to withstand the changes we're seeing in the climate. Our critical infrastructure will not help us in wartime if it's already been destroyed by a flood, and we have repeatedly seen roads, railways, and data centres suffer real impact from severe weather. Our technology lets asset owners and public authorities across Europe see where they are vulnerable to flooding. Our real-time forecasting system alerts asset and infrastructure owners so they can act before a storm hits, and our flood score for every building shows them exactly where that vulnerability sits.
If 7Analytics succeeds at the scale you're aiming for, what does climate resilience actually look like? How is the world operating differently because of what you've built?
To me, climate resilience means being able to prepare for what's coming. When bad weather approaches your city, we know where it's exposed and can take mitigating action in advance. Allocating government budgets for flood-protection systems, increasing culvert sizes, and building barriers. With our high-resolution flood-risk data, every building will have a flood-risk score based on our unique flood-modelling technology. Once we know which buildings are exposed, across silos we can act before the flooding happens. Insurance companies can price accurately and give homeowners incentives to reduce their flood risk and, in turn, their premiums. The same applies to public authorities. Information at this level should guide investment toward building climate resilience where the impact is greatest.
