Public perception of flood hazard and flood risk in Iceland: a case study in a watershed prone to ice-jam floods

2010 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 269-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Pagneux ◽  
Guðrún Gísladóttir ◽  
Salvör Jónsdóttir
Water ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Tawatchai Tingsanchali ◽  
Thanasit Promping

Estimating flood hazard, vulnerability, and flood risk at the household level in the past did not fully consider all relevant parameters. The main objective of this study is to improve this drawback by developing a new comprehensive and systematic methodology considering all relevant parameters and their weighting factors. This new methodology is applied to a case study of flood inundation in a municipal area of Nan City in the Upper Nan River Basin in Thailand. Field and questionnaire surveys were carried out to collect pertinent data for input into the new methodology for estimating flood hazard, vulnerability, and risk. Designed floods for various return periods were predicted using flood simulation models for assessing flood risk. The flood risk maps constructed for the return periods of 10–500 years show a substantial increase in flood risk with the return periods. The results are consistent with past flood damages, which were significant near and along the riverbanks where ground elevation is low, population density is high, and the number of household properties are high. In conclusion, this new comprehensive methodology yielded realistic results and can be used further to assess the effectiveness of various proposed flood mitigation measures.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 3183-3198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Fuchs ◽  
Konstantinos Karagiorgos ◽  
Kyriaki Kitikidou ◽  
Fotios Maris ◽  
Spyridon Paparrizos ◽  
...  

Abstract. Dealing with flood hazard and risk requires approaches rooted in both natural and social sciences, which provided the nexus for the ongoing debate on socio-hydrology. Various combinations of non-structural and structural flood risk reduction options are available to communities. Focusing on flood risk and the information associated with it, developing risk management plans is required but often overlooks public perception of a threat. The perception of risk varies in many different ways, especially between the authorities and the affected public. It is because of this disconnection that many risk management plans concerning floods have failed in the past. This paper examines the private adaptation capacity and willingness with respect to flooding in two different catchments in Greece prone to multiple flood events during the last 20 years. Two studies (East Attica and Evros) were carried out, comprised of a survey questionnaire of 155 and 157 individuals, from a peri-urban (East Attica) and a rural (Evros) area, respectively, and they focused on those vulnerable to periodic (rural area) and flash floods (peri-urban area). Based on the comparisons drawn from these responses, and identifying key issues to be addressed when flood risk management plans are implemented, improvements are being recommended for the social dimension surrounding such implementation. As such, the paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on human–environment interaction in socio-hydrology.


Author(s):  
Yi Chen ◽  
Zhicong Ye ◽  
Hui Liu ◽  
Ruishan Chen ◽  
Zhenhuan Liu ◽  
...  

The identification of vulnerable people and places to flood is crucial for effective disaster risk management. Here, we combine flood hazard and social vulnerability index to capture the potential risk of flood. In this paper, Nanjing was taken as the case study to explore the spatial pattern of social vulnerability towards flood at the community scale by developing an index system. Based on the flood risk results of ArcSWAT, the risk of flood disaster in Nanjing was evaluated. The results show the following. (1) Social vulnerability exhibits a central–peripheral pattern in general, which means that the social vulnerability degree is high in the central city and decreases gradually to the suburbs. (2) The susceptibility to flood disaster has a similar circle-layer pattern that is the highest in the urban centre, lower in the exurban areas, and the lowest in the suburb areas. (3) By using the GIS-based zoning approach, communities are classified into four types by comprehensively considering their flood susceptibility and social vulnerability. The spatial pattern is explained, and policy recommendation for reducing flood risk is provided for each type of community. The research has important reference significance for identifying the spatial pattern of social vulnerability to flood and then formulating targeted adaptation countermeasures.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qing Liu ◽  
Hanqing Xu ◽  
Jun Wang

Abstract. The co-occurrence of storm tide and rainstorm during tropical cyclones (TCs) can lead to compound flooding in low-lying coastal regions. The assessment of TC compound flood risk can provide vital insight for research on coastal flooding prevention. This study investigates TC compound flooding by constructing a storm surge model and overland flooding model using Delft3D Flexible Mesh (DFM), illustrating the serious consequences from the perspective of storm tide. Based on the probability distribution of storm tide, this study regards TC1415 as the 100-year event, TC6311 as the 50-year event, TC8616 as the 25-year event, TC8007 as the 10-year event, and TC7109 as the 5-year event. The results indicate that the coastal area is a major floodplain, primarily due to storm tide, with the inundation severity positively correlated with the height of the storm tide. For 100-year TC event, the inundation area with a depth above 1.0 m increases by approximately 2.5 times when compared with 5-year TC event. The comparison of single-driven flood (storm tide flooding and rainstorm inundation) and compound flood hazards shows that simply accumulating every single-driven flood hazard to define the compound flood hazard may cause underestimation. For future research on compound flooding, copula function can be adopted to investigate the joint occurrence of storm tide and rainstorm to reveal the severity of extreme TC flood hazards.


Author(s):  
Chiara Arrighi ◽  
Nicolas Huybrechts ◽  
Abdellatif Ouahsine ◽  
Patrick Chassé ◽  
Hocine Oumeraci ◽  
...  

Abstract. The mutual interaction between floods and human activity is a process, which has been evolving over history and has shaped flood risk pathways. In developed countries, many events have illustrated that the majority of the fatalities during a flood occurs in a vehicle, which is considered as a safe shelter but it may turn into a trap for several combinations of water depth and velocity. Thus, driving a car in floodwaters is recognized as the most crucial aggravating factor for people safety. On the other hand, the entrainment of vehicles may locally cause obstructions to the flow and induce the collapse of infrastructures. Flood risk to vehicles can be defined as the combination of the probability of a vehicle of being swept away (i.e. the hazard) and the actual traffic/parking density, i.e. the vulnerability. Hazard for vehicles can be assessed through the spatial identification and mapping of the critical conditions for vehicles incipient motion. This analysis requires a flood map with information on water depth and velocity and consistent instability criteria accounting for flood and vehicles characteristics. Vulnerability is evaluated thanks to the road network and traffic data. Therefore, vehicles flood risk mapping can support people's education and management practices in order to reduce the casualties. In this work, a flood hazard classification for vehicles is introduced and an application to a real case study is presented and discussed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Gusyev ◽  
A. Gädeke ◽  
J. Cullmann ◽  
J. Magome ◽  
A. Sugiura ◽  
...  

Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 1114
Author(s):  
Eduardo Lastrada ◽  
Guillermo Cobos ◽  
Francisco Javier Torrijo

Floods are one of the natural hazards that could be most affected by climate change, causing great economic damage and casualties in the world. On December 2019 in Reinosa (Cantabria, Spain), took place one of the worst floods in memory. Implementation of DIRECTIVE 2007/60/EC for the assessment and management of flood risks in Spain enabled the detection of this river basin with a potential significant flood risk via a preliminary flood risk assessment, and flood hazard and flood risk maps were developed. The main objective of this paper is to present a methodology to estimate climate change’s effects on flood hazard and flood risk, with Reinosa as the case study. This river basin is affected by the snow phenomenon, even more sensitive to climate change. Using different climate models, regarding a scenario of comparatively high greenhouse gas emissions (RCP8.5), with daily temperature and precipitation data from years 2007–2070, and comparing results in relative terms, flow rate and flood risk variation due to climate change are estimated. In the specific case of Reinosa, the MRI-CGCM3 model shows that climate change will cause a significant increase of potential affected inhabitants and economic damage due to flood risk. This evaluation enables us to define mitigation actions in terms of cost–benefit analysis and prioritize the ones that should be included in flood risk management plans.


2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 387-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Krasovskaia ◽  
L. Gottschalk ◽  
A. Skiple Ibrekk ◽  
H. Berg

Floods are natural phenomena and flood hazards cannot be eliminated. Thus it is necessary to learn living with this hazard. Floods represent a threat only with respect to human society, giving humans a central role: through location and through perception. Adequate perception of flood hazard is one of the premises to lower the vulnerability of the society and is an important element of non-structural measures for reducing flood risk. Public perception of flood hazard is essential for decision-making at all steps of flood risk assessment. The results of an investigation of the perception of flood hazard in five countries of the North Sea region of Europe are presented. 4000 Europeans living in flood-prone areas have been involved in the study. Stratified polls and focus groups were used as investigation tools. The study revealed many similarities in the perception of flood hazard among Europeans, such as limited interest in flood hazard, passiveness and reluctant attitude towards moving, while, for example, reckoning on flooding of their own houses differed between countries. The collected information offered a necessary background to streamline flood hazard information to laymen as well as for the second phase of the study, namely a search for consensus between public and authorities about what level of risk is tolerable.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattia Galizzi ◽  
Renzo Rosso ◽  
Daniele Bocchiola

<p>Flood risk in Italy is a wide-spread and never-ending issue. Traditional flood defense focused on making the river system “resistant” to flood events, possibly by flood-control structures including floodwalls, levees, dams and channels. These actions reduce the frequency of inundations, but they do not affect flooding effects, and associated impacts once the flood plain is inundated. In facts, structural flood defenses are designed and operated to accommodate floods not exceeding a given magnitude, as fixed by the original design. Thus, these engineering works are highly inefficient to cope with capacity-exceeding floods, the magnitude of which was fixed many years ago using poor data sets, and it is expected to increase with climate changes.</p><p>FLORIMAP (Smart FLOod RIsk MAnagement Policies), a project funded by Fondazione CARIPLO aims to revalue extreme floods distribution in the different homogeneous areas of northern Italy using regional approaches based upon recent data form the last three decades.</p><p>FLORIMAP will first cover open issues associated with the quantification of flood hazard and inundation risk, then it will assess human exposure and vulnerability, and combine these issues with strategies of communication and risk management, because risk communication is an important activity that can influence the flood risk management. Communication is the bridge between the technical and professional community, decision makers, elected officials, funding sources, and the public at large. The literature on risk communication and perception has highlighted that the understanding of the psychological perception of environmental risk is a crucial factor in order to foster the community resilience and to promote adaptive attitudes and behaviors.</p><p>Here, we present a preliminary assessment of updated extreme values distribution for the case study of Northern Italy hydrologically homogeneous regions. The results will be then compared against those obtained with previous dataset dating until 1970, to study the evolution of flood hazard and inundation risk under recent climate change. We then provide application of flood hazard, and risk for a case study area, and demonstrate modified hazard under recent climate change.</p><p>We then discuss implications for risk communication in the target areas, and provide suggestions for prosecution of the FLORIMAP project. </p>


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document