Project Partner: InnSure, Summer 2026

Project Summary: When a flood hits, we determine the damage in dollars very well. We are far worse at determining who cannot recover. Standard flood models estimate the cost to repair buildings. They miss the renter displaced for weeks, the hourly worker who loses wages instead of property, and the family that never returns. These hidden losses fall hardest on the households least able to absorb them.

Jiahang partnered with InnSure, which is building a flood-risk tool for Massachusetts towns, to solve a problem its own design documents had named but left unmeasured. He designed a new method to measure a flood’s social burden, meaning the yearly dollar cost of its toll on a community’s ability to recover. His method captures multiple kinds of losses, not only repair and replacement costs but also health losses and displacement costs, among other factors. He then tested this model on the town of Plymouth, one of Massachusetts’ most flood-prone coastlines.

Jiahang’s analysis revealed that in Plymouth, the greatest flood damage and the greatest social vulnerability overlap rather than falling on separate neighborhoods. The town’s two most socially vulnerable neighborhoods sit inside its highest-hazard flood zone. Because the residents least able to recover are also the most exposed, the finding changes whom towns and insurers should protect first. His method now lives in InnSure’s social burden framework, where it is shaping the next version of the company’s model planning.

How Jiahang measures Social Burden — a flood’s dollar loss weighted by who can least afford it, summed into one yearly figure.

 

Where the loss concentrates — potential building-loss hotspots. Building footprints shaded by assessed value × coastal depth–damage at a 4-ft wave event: (a) full Zone of Interest; (b) town-center / harbor detail.

 

Project Deliverables:

  • Component-Method Note operationalizing InnSure’s Social Burden metric, a four-component method for valuing displacement, lost income, health, and uncompensated loss.
  • A rebuilt flood-risk framework inside InnSure’s prototype web application.
  • Conference abstract and peer-reviewed journal article operationalizing the social burden of coastal flooding in preparation.

 

Watch Jiahang’s URBAN internship lightning talk here.