Inside JBA Labs: Where innovation becomes impact
Innovation is at our core; we are continuously evolving and pushing the boundaries. Using our technical expertise, we create forward-thinking products, services and data-led solutions that deliver real value for our clients. JBA Labs is a vehicle to accelerate this, to turn ideas into impact. Read on to find out more about our latest projects.
Bringing innovation to life
We're committed to advancing both the pace and scale of innovation across JBA - empowering our people to turn ideas into impact. JBA Labs, our dedicated innovation accelerator programme, plays a key role in this journey. It provides the support and structure to nurture innovation at every stage, from shaping early concepts right through to full commercialisation. Whether it's improving internal processes or developing entirely new solutions, JBA Labs helps bring ideas to life at any scale.
Discover how JBA Labs is turning ideas into impact in our latest projects.
Smarter modelling for natural flood management
Vegetation and woody debris are known to slow river flows, but representing their effects in hydraulic models can be challenging. Traditional methods, such as adjusting Manning’s roughness or modifying DEMs (Digital Elevation Model), can be imprecise or difficult to implement. This JBA Labs study explored porosity-based approaches as a simple, consistent way to model vegetation and natural flood management features across a range of 2D and 3D modelling platforms.
By linking real-world characteristics, such as log size and vegetation density, to model parameters, the approach was successfully validated against flume experiments and catchment-scale applications. Results showed porous zones can effectively represent leaky dams, reforestation, and natural bank protection, providing a practical bridge between physical processes and efficient large-scale hydraulic modelling. This innovation enables clients to quantify the flood risk benefits of natural flood management measures, such as leaky dams and reforestation, with greater accuracy and confidence.
Resilience Studio® - making every flood resilience investment count
Resilience Studio® provides a comprehensive library of analytical tools to evaluate multiple strategies across catchments and coastal environments, using standard appraisal methods. It also visualises whole-life benefits and costs, helping clients to optimise investment decisions, such as infrastructure and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) over time and build a clear picture of resilience.
The Devon and Cornwall Resilience Studio® project, delivered through the Devon Resilience Innovation Project (DRIP) for Devon County Council and the Environment Agency, has applied JBA’s Resilience Studio® to explore how flood risk and resilience can be understood at a strategic scale. Rather than focusing on individual schemes, the work has developed a consistent, spatially explicit framework for assessing current and future flood risk across Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, and for testing how different combinations of interventions such as defences, nature-based solutions, property-level measures and flood warning can reduce risk over time.
Resilience Studio® is helping organisations understand where and how to invest in flood resilience by comparing different intervention options and assessing how they could reduce flood risk over time across an entire region.
Reimagining coastal wave modelling with machine learning
This project investigated the use of machine learning to emulate SWAN coastal wave modelling, maintaining the accuracy of physics-based simulations while dramatically reducing run times. Using a Graph Neural Network trained on over 4,000 SWAN simulations, the model can predict nearshore wave conditions across entire domains, overcoming limitations of previous location-specific approaches.
The new method delivers accuracy comparable to SWAN while reducing simulation times from around 15 minutes to just 7 seconds, enabling efficient large-scale forecasting and risk assessment. It also enables wave results to be generated across the entire model domain, improving flood and erosion studies while reducing costs and the need for site-specific model tuning.
Using this approach, clients can now benefit from near-instant wave predictions that retain the accuracy of traditional modelling. This supports faster, more cost-effective flood and erosion assessments, enabling wider scenario testing and providing the evidence needed to make confident decisions about coastal resilience and infrastructure planning.
Unlocking improved NFM benefit appraisal with flood risk data
This project streamlined the appraisal of NbS by integrating tools and workflows for opportunity mapping, hydrological modelling, and investment planning. New Python-based tools identify opportunities for floodplain storage, leaky barriers, soil improvements, and woodland creation using open data across England and Wales - and are already being applied in live projects.
The project also enhanced the setup and application of the Dynatop hydrological model by standardising data processing and intervention representation at a national scale. These improvements have increased efficiency across the appraisal process, supported the development of software tools for client interfaces, and are already being used in projects including work with the World Bank. These enhancements are enabling clients to identify where nature-based solutions may be more useful, understand their potential benefits, and support investment decisions more efficiently.
Contact Zoe Smith to find out more about innovation at JBA.
