A Conceptual Time-Varying Flood Resilience Index for Urban Areas: Munich City

Abstract

In response to the increased frequency and severity of urban flooding events, flood management strategies are moving away from flood proofing towards flood resilience. The term ‘flood resilience’ has been applied with different definitions. In this paper, it is referred to as the capacity to withstand adverse effects following flooding events and the ability to quickly recover to the original system performance before the event. This paper introduces a novel time-varying Flood Resilience Index (FRI) to quantify the resilience level of households. The introduced FRI includes: (a) Physical indicators from inundation modelling for considering the adverse effects during flooding events, and (b) social and economic indicators for estimating the recovery capacity of the district in returning to the original performance level. The district of Maxvorstadt in Munich city is used for demonstrating the FRI. The time-varying FRI provides a novel insight into indicator-based quantification methods of flood resilience for households in urban areas. It enables a timeline visualization of how a system responds during and after a flooding event.

Keywords

• flood resilience index
• flood resilience analysis
• urban floods
• flood risk assessment
• flood inundation modelling