A new flood risk assessment framework for evaluating the effectiveness of policies to improve urban flood resilience

ABSTRACT

To better understand the impacts of flooding such that authorities can plan for adapting measures to cope with future scenarios, we have developed a modified Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework to allow policy makers to evaluate strategies for improving flood resilience in cities. We showed that this framework proved an effective approach to assessing and improving urban flood resilience, albeit with some limitations. This framework has difficulties in capturing all the important relationships in cities, especially with regards to feedbacks. There is therefore a need to develop improved techniques for understanding components and their relationships. While this research showed that risk assessment is possible even at the mega-city scale, new techniques will support advances in this field. Finally, a chain of models engenders uncertainties. However, the resilience approach promoted in this research, is an effective manner to work with uncertainty by providing the capacity to cope and respond to multiple scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban Flooding
• Strategic Planning
• Risk Management

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Philippe Quevauviller and Eleni Manoli from the EC DG Research, and Marc Erlich from Artelia Group for their invaluable support and guidance. We also acknowledge the suggestions for improvement of this paper offered by anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

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]. The work in this paper was partially funded by the PEARL (Preparing for Extreme And Rare events in coastaL regions) project, supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme [Grant Agreement No 603663].