Ariel view of a severely impacted flood area

Cloud to Street

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Model & Strategy

Cloud to Street is a flood-mapping and monitoring system designed to protect the most vulnerable communities from natural disasters. Cloud to Street’s industry-leading, high-resolution mapping of flood-prone areas is used by planners, insurers and disaster response agencies to better understand and price flood risk, insure vulnerable populations, prepare for floods, and respond to flood events in near real-time. By leveraging machine learning, satellite imagery, crowd-sourced data, and new data platforms like Google Earth Engine, their technology platform can dynamically map the 100-year floodplain for any community around the world within seconds

Cloud to Street logo
At a Glance
Founded: 2015
By: Bessie Schwarz and Beth Tellman
Environment & Climate Change
Location of work: International
http://www.cloudtostreet.info/
Cloud to Street
68 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
The global high resolution flood mapping and monitoring system.
A man shows the destruction of his home and hold his hand to the side of the building to indicate how high the flood waters rose
Cloud to Street entrepreneurs Bessie Schwarz and Beth Tellman
Meet Bessie Schwarz and Beth Tellman

Cloud to Street is led by co-founders Bessie Schwarz, CEO, and Beth Tellman, Chief of Science, who met as Masters students at Yale University’s School of Environmental Sciences and Forestry, where Cloud to Street started as their thesis research. Beth previously worked as a scientist at the Nature Conservancy and on disaster relief and resilience in El Salvador on a Fulbright Scholarship, where she co-founded a local non-profit, Ceiba Foundation, focused on conservation and post-disaster reconstruction. Beth is currently completing her Ph.D. at Arizona State University studying human-flood interactions globally, with an emphasis on Latin American cities. Bessie previously worked as a community organizer and director at organizations including Green Corps, Environment America, and Environment Colorado, and serves as a research affiliate at The Data Pop Alliance.

Impact

So far, Cloud to Street has identified 5 million people at risk in 7 countries. Within 5 years, they plan to power catastrophe insurance for 50 million people, and to provide risk data to the majority of the world’s 100 most vulnerable watersheds.

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