Assessing urban system vulnerabilities to flooding to improve resilience and adaptation in spatial planning

Fluvial, pluvial and coastal flooding are the most frequent and costly natural hazard. Cities are social hubs and life in cities is reliant on a number of services and functions such as housing, healthcare, education and other key daily facilities. Urban flooding can cause significant disruption to these services and wider impacts on the population. These impacts may be short or long with a variably spatial scale: urban systems are spatially distributed and the nature of this can have significant effects on flood impacts. From an urban-planning perspective, measuring this disruption and its consequences is fundamental in order to develop more resilient cities. Whereas the assessment of physical vulnerabilities and direct damages is commonly addressed, new methodologies for assessing the systemic vulnerability and indirect damages at the urban scale are required. The proposed systemic approach recognizes the city as a collection of sub-systems or functional units (such as neighborhoods and suburbs), interconnected through the road network, providing key daily services to inhabitants (e.g., healthcare facilities, schools, food shops, leisure and cultural services). Each city is part of broader systems—which may or may not match administrative boundaries—and, as such, needs to be connected to its wider surroundings in a multi-scalar perspective. The systemic analysis, herein limited to residential households, is based on network-accessibility measures and evaluates the presence, the distribution among urban units and the redundancy of key daily services. Trying to spatially sketch the existence of systemic interdependences between neighborhoods, suburbs and municipalities, the proposed method highlights how urban systemic vulnerability spreads beyond the flooded areas. The aim is to understand which planning patterns and existing mixed-use developments are more flood resilient, thereby informing future urban development and regeneration projects. The methodology has been developed based on GIS and applied to an Italian municipality (Noale) in the metropolitan area of Venice, NE Italy

Recurrent governance challenges in the implementation and alignment of flood risk management strategies: a review

In Europe increasing flood risks challenge societies to diversify their Flood Risk Management Strategies (FRMSs). Such a diversification implies that actors not only focus on flood defence, but also and simultaneously on flood risk prevention, mitigation, preparation and recovery. There is much literature on the implementation of specific strategies and measures as well as on flood risk governance more generally. What is lacking, though, is a clear overview of the complex set of governance challenges which may result from a diversification and alignment of FRM strategies. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap. It elaborates on potential processes and mechanisms for coordinating the activities and capacities of actors that are involved on different levels and in different sectors of flood risk governance, both concerning the implementation of individual strategies and the coordination of the overall set of strategies. It identifies eight overall coordination mechanisms that have proven to be useful in this respect

Climate change and increased risk for the insurance sector: A global perspective and an assessment for the Netherlands.

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. As a consequence, economic losses caused by natural catastrophes could increase significantly. This will have considerable consequences for the insurance sector. On the one hand, increased risk from weather extremes requires assessing expected changes in damage and including adequate climate change projections in risk management. On the other hand, climate change can also bring new business opportunities for insurers. This paper gives an overview of the consequences of climate change for the insurance sector and discusses several strategies to cope with and adapt to increased risks. The particular focus is on the Dutch insurance sector, as the Netherlands is extremely vulnerable to climate change, especially with regard to extreme precipitation and flooding. Current risk sharing arrangements for weather risks are examined while potential new business opportunities, adaptation strategies, and public-private partnerships are identified. © The Author(s) 2009