Urban flood impact assessment: A state-of-the-art review

Abstract

Flooding can cause major disruptions in cities, and lead to significant impacts on people, the economy and on the environment. These impacts may be exacerbated by climate and socio-economic changes. Resilience thinking has become an important way for city planners and decision makers to manage flood risks.

Despite different definitions of resilience, a consistent theme is that flood resilient cities are impacted less by extreme flood events. Therefore, flood risk professionals and planners need to understand flood impacts to build flood resilient cities. This paper presents a state-of-the-art literature review on flood impact assessment in urban areas, detailing their application, and their limitations. It describes both techniques for dealing with individual categories of impacts, as well as methodologies for integrating them. The paper will also identify future avenues for progress in improving the techniques.

Keywords::

• urban flooding
• resilience
• impact assessment
• urban water management

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have helped improve the manuscript.

Funding

Research on the CORFU (Collaborative research on flood resilience in urban areas) project was funded by the European Commission through Framework Programme 7, Grant Number 244047.