Dataharvest 2025 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Floods are among the most frequent and damaging natural disasters in Europe, yet understanding their true impact remains difficult. As of now, there is no harmonized, official European database that systematically tracks flood damage across sectors and regions. Satellite data from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) offers a powerful resource for addressing this gap. This session will introduce participants to the methodology developed by the Troubled Waters project to retrieve, clean, and structure Copernicus flood data from 2023-2024. It will show how to calculate flood extent and impact across agriculture, infrastructure, ecosystems, and population areas—and how to link the impacted areas to official EU statistical regions using NUTS classifications. It will also demonstrate challenges in the data, such as overlapping observations and irregular boundaries, and the approach to resolving them. Additionally, the session will explain the process of building a decade-long flood dataset combining inconsistent data from Copernicus, Hanze and EM-DAT. Participants will also receive ready-to-use code for both Python users and those without a coding background. Finally, the session will demonstrate how these insights can be transformed into a visual, scrollytelling story format that helps communicate complex findings to broader audiences.