The Role of Urban Growth in Resilience of Communities Under Flood Risk

Abstract

Flood risk to urban communities is increasing significantly as a result of the integrated effects of climate change and socioeconomic development. The latter effect is one of the main drivers of rising flood risk has received less attention in comparison to climate change. Economic development and population growth are major causes of urban expansion in flood‐prone areas, and a comprehensive understanding of the impact of urban growth on flood risk is an essential ingredient of effective flood risk management. At the same time, planning for community resilience has become a national and worldwide imperative in recent years. Enhancements to community resilience require well‐integrated and enormous long‐term public and private investments. Accordingly, comprehensive urban growth plans should take rising flood risk into account to ensure future resilient communities through careful collaboration between engineers, geologists, socialists, economists, and urban planners within the framework of life‐cycle analysis. This paper highlights the importance of including urban growth in accurate future flood risk assessment and how planning for future urbanization should include measurement science‐based strategies in developing policies to achieve more resilient communities.

Minimal Building Flood Fragility and Loss Function Portfolio for Resilience Analysis at the Community Level

“…The mean and standard deviation for the 1000 random simulations were calculated at each intensity measure as shown in Figure 6b. As mentioned earlier, a second flood loss method (Method 2) was investigated, which is based on the developed fragility curves and the replacement cost for each DS using Equation (7). The small difference between the direct and fragility-based flood loss curve is due to using the lognormal fitted fragility functions in developing the fragility-based flood loss curve.…”

“…curves and the replacement cost for each DS using Equation (7). The small difference between the direct and fragility-based flood loss curve is due to using the lognormal fitted fragility functions in developing the fragility-based flood loss curve.…”

“…Subsequently, the replacement cost for each component within the same simulation is summed to calculate the statistical distribution of the total building replacement cost. On the other hand, the fragility-based approach uses the lognormal fitted building fragility curves (exceedance probability of each DS) to account for the total building loss by multiplying the probability of being in each DS by the replacement cost of each DS as shown in Equation (7). The fragility-based flood loss method should give a loss curve similar to the one developed by the direct loss approach because both methods account for components' failure probability and the weights of the replacement cost of each component.…”

“…Flood hazards are being exacerbated by climate change, making flood risk quantification and adaptive mitigation to flood risk increasingly challenging. As a result, flood risk research has received significant interest over the past decade with the goal of providing frameworks, approaches, and methods that model flood risk at the community-level [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Flood risk consists of three main components, namely the hazard, exposure, and vulnerability.…”

The Value of Urban Flood Modeling

“…In combination with flood vulnerability assessment models (Hammond et al., 2015), results from UFMs can be used to evaluate the costs and benefits of flood resilience strategies (Lerer et al., 2017). However, use of UFMs to support resilience planning is heavily dependent on the capability of the model to represent both current conditions and the function of various management strategies, such as land use planning or the construction of gray and green infrastructure, under realistic operating conditions (Hemmati et al., 2020; Kaykhosravi, et al., 2018; Niazi et al., 2017). As cities plan multibillion dollar flood resilience initiatives (Aerts, Botzen, Moel, & Bowman, 2013; City of Copenhagen, 2012; NYCDEP/Ramboll, 2017), development and use of robust UFMs present a great value to support the optimized design of these infrastructure and their operation.…”