Using historical source data to understand urban flood risk: a socio-hydrological modelling application at Gregório Creek, Brazil

Abstract

The city of São Carlos, state of São Paulo, Brazil, has a historical coexistence between society and floods. Unplanned urbanization in this area is a representative feature of how Brazilian cities have developed, undermining the impact of natural hazards. The Gregório Creek catchment is an enigma of complex dynamics concerning the relationship between humans and water in Brazilian cities. Our hypothesis is that social memory of floods can improve future resilience.In this paper we analyse flood risk dynamics in a small urban catchment, identify the impacts of social memory on building resilience and propose measures to reduce the risk of floods. We applied a socio-hydrological model using data collected from newspapers from 1940 to 2018. The model was able to elucidate human-water processes in the catchment and the historical source data proved to be a useful tool to fill gaps in the data in small urban basins.

A Systematic Review of Spatial-Temporal Scale Issues in Sociohydrology

“…Ferreira and Ghimire, 2012; Di Baldassarre et al, 2013Baldassarre et al, , 2014Baldassarre et al, , 2016Wilhelmi and Morss, 2013;Braden et al, 2014;O'Connell and O'Donnell, 2014;Schumann and Nijssen, 2014;Viglione et al, 2014;Chang and Huang, 2015;Chen et al, 2016;Grames et al, 2016;Hazarika et al, 2016;Ward and Winter, 2016;Camargo, 2017;Ciullo et al, 2017;Mostert, 2017;Yu et al, 2017;Horn and Elagib, 2018;Robinne et al, 2018;Shelton et al, 2018;Tellman et al, 2018;Abadie et al, 2019;Abebe et al, 2019aAbebe et al, ,b, 2020Barendrecht et al, 2019;Bojórquez-Tapia et al, 2019;Caprario and Finotti, 2019;Haer et al, 2019;Viero et al, 2019;Devkota, 2020;Dziubanski et al, 2020;Haeffner and Hellman, 2020;Hossain et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2020;Lee and Kang, 2020;Michaelis et al, 2020;Ridolfi et al, 2020a,b;Saia et al, 2020;Sarmento Buarque et al, 2020;Sawada and Hanazaki, 2020;Song et al, 2020;Zhao and Mo, 2020;…”

“…Demography was frequently used as a control or endogenous variable (Braden et al, 2014;Roobavannan et al, 2017;Breyer et al, 2018;Ferdous et al, 2018;Garcia and Islam, 2018;Sarmento Buarque et al, 2020). A majority of sociohydrological research containing issues of scale and feedbacks do not utilize demographic variables to featurein analysis the latent structural sinequalities that operate at the center of the human-water nexus (Sanderson, 2018).…”

Integrating Multiple Research Methods to Unravel the Complexity of Human‐Water Systems

“…While being inspired by empirical observations, sociohydrological models in turn inspire new types of data collections. The concept of collective flood memory, for example, motivated empirical studies and the collection of historical data exploring changes over time in the way in which people remember and perceive floods (Buarque et al, 2020;Mondino et al, 2020). New observations can then help evaluate the explanatory value of the model(s), or stimulate the development of a new set of hypotheses (Ridolfi et al, 2020) within iterative processes that ultimately produce new scientific knowledge.…”

Citizens AND HYdrology (CANDHY): conceptualizing a transdisciplinary framework for citizen science addressing hydrological challenges

“…Citizen science is expected to reinforce the value and mission of sociohydrology in understanding and addressing sustainable development and environmental issues (Pande and Sivapalan, 2017;Di Baldassarre et al, 2019, Fritz et al, 2019. Approaches for connecting citizen science and socio-hydrology are still not well defined, but initial investigations on this topic are emerging (Sarmento Buarque et al, 2020).…”