A multi-component flood risk assessment in the Maresme coast (NW Mediterranean)

Abstract

Coastal regions are the areas most threatened by natural hazards, with floods being the most frequent and significant threat in terms of their induced impacts, and therefore, any management scheme requires their evaluation. In coastal areas, flooding is a hazard associated with various processes acting at different scales: coastal storms, flash floods, and sea level rise (SLR). In order to address the problem as a whole, this study presents a methodology to undertake a preliminary integrated risk assessment that determines the magnitude of the different flood processes (flash flood, marine storm, SLR) and their associated consequences, taking into account their temporal and spatial scales. The risk is quantified using specific indicators to assess the magnitude of the hazard (for each component) and the consequences in a common scale. This allows for a robust comparison of the spatial risk distribution along the coast in order to identify both the areas at greatest risk and the risk components that have the greatest impact. This methodology is applied on the Maresme coast (NW Mediterranean, Spain), which can be considered representative of developed areas of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The results obtained characterise this coastline as an area of relatively low overall risk, although some hot spots have been identified with high-risk values, with flash flooding being the principal risk process.

Impact of land use changes on flash flood prediction using a sub-daily SWAT model in five Mediterranean ungauged watersheds (SE Spain)

“…their differences with common floods, and associated factors can be found in Nogueira de Andrade and Szlafsztein (2018), Ballesteros et al (2018), Camarasa-Belmonte et al (2011), Conesa-García et al (2017), Rozalis et al (2010), Zhong et al (2018), etc.…”

“…Moreover, at the end of the summer the warm water surface temperature of the Mediterranean Sea raises the convective energy of the superimposed air masses and the complex topography from these coastal areas increases the moist convection (Amengual et al, 2015;Ballesteros et al, 2018), leading to very high intensity rainfall events. Consequences of this situation have been widely identified in many studies along most affected provinces in the Southeast of Spain as Almería (Molina-Sanchis et al, 2016), Murcia (Amengual et al, 2015;Conesa-García et al, 2017;Hooke, 2016), Almería and Murcia (Bracken et al, 2008), Alicante (Martínez-Ibarra, 2012;Olcina-Cantos et al, 2010), Murcia and Alicante (Pérez-Morales et al, 2015), Valencia (Camarasa-Belmonte, 2016;Camarasa-Belmonte et al, 2011;Camarasa-Belmonte and Segura-Beltran, 2001) and Barcelona (Ballesteros et al, 2018). Nevertheless, the study of temporal evolution of hydrological response as a consequence of land use changes along time has not yet fully undertaken jointly with high intensity convective storms.…”

Coastal Vulnerability Assessment along the North-Eastern Sector of Gozo Island (Malta, Mediterranean Sea)

“…Running parallel to other research at the European level, further studies could include the spatial susceptibility analysis, including each of the coastal hazardous processes already identified here as affecting the investigated stretch of coast (e.g., erosion, sea level rise, landslides). As already done for other coastal zones in Europe [39,40,54], the investigated area should be classified into zones with different susceptibility, accounting for their proneness to be potentially affected by the specific impacts from extreme events and related processes pertaining to the particular hazard types (e.g., erosion, sea level rise, landslides). The susceptibility to different climate-and marine-related hazards could then be coupled with the vulnerability data derived by this study to perform a complete risk analysis (as done for example in [25,53]).…”

“…Following on from the methodological approaches proposed in previous studies [42,[51][52][53][54], this study formulates and applies a research method for overall vulnerability assessment, which is based on the following steps: (i) identification of the main exposed elements (natural and anthropic) located in the investigated area; (ii) definition of their relative exposure level, in economic and ecological terms; (iii) assessment of the social vulnerability of the population living in the investigated area; (iv) calculation of the overall vulnerability by means of a combined index. As highlighted in [55] the use of an index as an evaluation tool requires the definition, weighting and aggregation of a number of indicators, which are defined as variables that are "an operational representation of a characteristic or quality of a system" [56,57].…”

Development of a Novel Climate Adaptation Algorithm for Climate Risk Assessment

“…Therefore, the inundation potential maps with 350 mm and 600 mm of 24-h rainfall are regarded as current and future hazards to demonstrate spatial information of risk maps based on the investigation of climate adaptation strategies by the proposed algorithm. As for the factors of vulnerability of the protected target for flood risk, reasonable causes in terms of selecting these vulnerability factors are as follows [26][27][28][29][30]: (1) Population for young children and older people: based on a human or economic perspective, the degree of hazards will be associated with the population of the affected area, especially for children and the elderly; (2) Poverty level: the percentage of people living below the lower poverty line in an area represents the poverty level (in general, a poor community is not only economically vulnerable but simultaneously have lack of social and political capacities to cope with disasters. ); (3) Female to male ratio: number of women to number of men in an area due to the consideration of the possibility of pregnancy for females.…”