Preparedness against floods in a hazard management perspective plays a major role in the pre-event phase. Hence, assessing urban vulnerability and resilience towards floods for different risk scenarios is a prerequisite for urban planners and decision makers. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to propose the design and implementation of a spatial decision support tool for mapping flood vulnerability in the metropolis of Tehran under different risk scenarios. Several factors reflecting topographical and hydrological characteristics, demographics, vegetation, land use, and urban features were considered, and their weights were determined using expert opinions and the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method. Thereafter, a vulnerability map for different risk scenarios was prepared using the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) method. Based on our findings from the vulnerability analysis of the case study, it was concluded that in the optimistic scenario (ORness = 1), more than 36% of Tehran’s metropolis area was marked with very high vulnerability, and in the pessimistic scenario (ORness = 0), it was less than 1%was marked with very high vulnerability. The sensitivity analysis of our results confirmed that the validity of the model’s outcomes in different scenarios, i.e., high reliability of the model’s outcomes. The methodical approach, choice of data, and the presented results and discussions can be exploited by a wide range of stakeholders, e.g., urban planners, decision makers, and hydrologists, to better plan and build resilience against floods.
The purpose of this study is to assess the vulnerability of urban blocks to earthquakes for Tehran as a city built on geological faults using an artificial neural network—multi-layer perceptron (ANN-MLP). Therefore, we first classified earthquake vulnerability evaluation criteria into three categories: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability capacity attributed to a total of 16 spatial criteria, which were inputted into the neural network. To train the neural network and compute an earthquake vulnerability map, we used a combined Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) process with 167 vulnerable locations as training data, of which 70% (117 points) were used for training, and 30% (50 points) were used for testing and validation. The Mean Average Error (MAE) of the implemented neural network was 0.085, which proves the efficacy of the designed model. The results showed that 29% of Tehran’s total area is extremely vulnerable to earthquakes. Our factor importance analysis showed that factors such as proximity to fault lines, high population density, and environmental factors gained higher importance scores for earthquake vulnerability assessment of the given case study. This methodical approach and the choice of data and methods can provide insight into scaling up the study to other regions. In addition, the resultant outcomes can help decision makers and relevant stakeholders to mitigate risks through resilience building.
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