Worldwide, there is a need to enhance our understanding of vulnerability and to develop methodologies and tools to assess vulnerability. One of the most important goals of assessing coastal flood vulnerability, in particular, is to create a readily understandable link between the theoretical concepts of flood vulnerability and the day-to-day decision-making process and to encapsulate this link in an easily accessible tool. This article focuses on developing a Coastal City Flood Vulnerability Index (CCFVI) based on exposure, susceptibility and resilience to coastal flooding. It is applied to nine cities around the world, each with different kinds of exposure. With the aid of this index, it is demonstrated which cities are most vulnerable to coastal flooding with regard to the system's components, that is, hydro-geological, socio-economic and politico-administrative. The index gives a number from 0 to 1, indicating comparatively low or high coastal flood vulnerability, which shows which cities are most in need of further, more detailed investigation for decision-makers. Once its use to compare the vulnerability of a range of cities under current conditions has been demonstrated, it is used to study the impact of climate change on the vulnerability of these cities over a longer timescale. The results show that CCFVI provides a means of obtaining a broad overview of flood vulnerability and the effect of possible adaptation options. This, in turn, will allow for the direction of resources to more in-depth investigation of the most promising strategies.

A Monte Carlo method for simulating a multi-dimensional diffusion process conditioned on hitting a fixed point at a fixed future time is developed. Proposals for such diffusion bridges are obtained by superimposing an additional guiding term to the drift of the process under consideration. The guiding term is derived via approximation of the target process by a simpler diffusion processes with known transition densities. Acceptance of a proposal can be determined by computing the likelihood ratio between the proposal and the target bridge, which is derived in closed form. We show under general conditions that the likelihood ratio is well defined and show that a class of proposals with guiding term obtained from linear approximations fall under these conditions.

No abstract

Operative notes do not adequately represent the actual LCs performed as they describe fewer important procedural steps. It is suggested that operative notes should include video recordings.