Assessing fluvial flood risk in urban environments: a case study

Abstract

Nowadays, floods are among the most impactful calamities regarding costs. Looking at the natural hazards damage data collected in the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT), it is observable a significant increase over the past four decades of both frequency of floods and associated costs. Similarly, dramatic trends are also found by analyzing other types of flood losses, such as the number of people affected by floods, homeless, injured or killed.To deal with the aforementioned rise of flood risk, more and more efforts are being made to promote integrated flood risk management, for example, the Flood Directive 2007/60/EC. The main goals of this research are the estimation of flood damages using the KULTURisk methodology and the comparing of the projected costs with the observed one. The case study is the 2002 flood in Eilenburg. According to KULTURisk methodology, two major classes of data are considered to evaluate flood risk damage: hydraulic data as regards Hazard and economic information to assess Exposure and Vulnerability This study shows the possibility to extend the lesson learned with the Eilenburg case study in other similar contexts.