As climate change drives more extreme weather patterns, the need for accurate and timely flood forecasting has never been greater. A global leader in this effort, Google’s Flood Hub, uses artificial intelligence to predict riverine floods1, and behind the scenes, WorldPop’s Global Project Population dataset is playing a pivotal role in shaping the tool’s impact.
Flood forecasting alone isn’t enough. To make a real difference, humanitarian organisations and governments need to know who will be affected. That’s where WorldPop comes in. This high-resolution population data is a key ingredient in helping Google not only predict where floods will strike but also understand how many people are at risk.
Google intersects its AI-generated flood risk maps with the WorldPop dataset to estimate population coverage. By the end of 2024, this method revealed a remarkable statistic: Google’s forecasts covered over 700 million people in more than 100 countries. That’s nearly 10% of the world’s population who are now better equipped to anticipate and respond to flood disasters2.
WorldPop’s value isn’t theoretical, it has proven essential during real flood seasons. In the 2021 monsoon season, which brought devastating floods to India and Bangladesh, the dataset was used to estimate population exposure across key Areas of Interest. At that time, Flood Hub forecasts were reaching regions where 245 million people lived, allowing local authorities and aid organisations to prioritize resources and alerts3.
The reach of WorldPop-enabled flood analysis extends beyond Google’s own efforts. For example, in Nigeria, the dataset has been instrumental in anticipatory action frameworks that rely on Flood Hub data. During the deadly 2022 floods, humanitarian planners used WorldPop to overlay satellite flood extents and estimate population exposure at the state level – a crucial metric for deploying emergency response effectively4.
These broader applications highlight how critical the dataset has become, not only for forecasting but for human-centred flood risk assessment worldwide.
As flood risks continue to rise globally, the synergy between AI and demographic data like WorldPop’s will be central to disaster resilience. By fusing cutting-edge forecasts with a clear picture of who’s at risk, tools like Google’s Flood Hub are moving beyond technology to become vital lifelines and now includes a new feature that forecasts ‘significant flood events’. And as WorldPop continues to refine its population models, the precision and impact of these forecasts will continue to improve, helping the world move from reactive to proactive disaster management.
We’re trialling the ‘Deep Dive’ audio summary feature of Google’s NotebookLM. This feature uses AI to create a podcast-like audio conversation between two AI-derived hosts that summarise key points of documents - in this case the Google Environment Report 2025 plus the two relevant journal articles listed below.
As Google acknowledge that NotebookLM outputs may contain errors, we have been careful to check, edit and validate this audio.
Please contact us to let us know what you think.
Music: My Guitar, Lowtone Music, Free Music Archive (CC BY-NC-ND)
Learn more
- Google Flood Hub
- Google Environment Report 2025
- Flood forecasting with machine learning models in an operational framework (Hydrology and Earth System Sciences)
- Risk Assessment of the 2022 Nigerian Flood Event Using Remote Sensing Products and Climate Data (Remote Sensing)
