ESA-CHANGE/CCI-Health-Floods-South-Sudan

# Impact of flooding on health care services in South Sudan (GMV) **General Context**: South Sudan is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries globally, where recurrent and intensifying flooding events are severely impacting both populations and an already fragile healthcare system. In recent years, large-scale floods have displaced over 1.4 million people and caused widespread disruption to healthcare services, including facility closures, restricted access, treatment interruptions, and increased transmission of water- and sanitation-related diseases. In this context, this use case focuses on analysing the impact of flooding on healthcare service delivery and infrastructure, with particular attention to health facility functionality and accessibility. **Goal**: The objective is to develop a quantitative understanding of how flood dynamics translate into health system disruptions, and to assess the extent to which these impacts are influenced by climate variability and change. **Methods**: The analysis adopts a risk-based framework, where flooding is treated as the primary hazard interacting with exposure (health infrastructure and populations) and vulnerability (health system capacity, accessibility constraints, and socio-economic conditions). Within this framework, the study characterises how flooding events—varying in intensity, duration, and spatial extent—affect healthcare services across the country. ## Description The approach is centred on the integration of **EO data** with **health infrastructure** information to characterise flood dynamics and their impacts. EO-derived datasets (e.g., VIIRS, SWOT, CCI Land Cover, and digital elevation models) are used to derive long-term indicators of flood extent, frequency, duration, and water surface elevation, which are combined with health facility inventories (e.g., WHO Master Facility List) to assess exposure. Although VIIRS serves as the main source of flood data, particular attention is given to Surface …