| dc.description.abstract | Traditionally, people have inhabited places with ready access to fresh water. Today, over 50% of the global population live near water. Due to population growth, ongoing economic development, and extreme weather events, urban areas are growing more susceptible to flood risks and the costs of inaction of failing to manage flood risks are high. To properly manage flood risks, assessments are needed to determine the flood risk level and where to allocate scarce financial resources for risk reduction. Flood risk is a function of flood hazard and consequence, hazard is the flood probability and consequence is the damage caused. Methods of assessing flood hazards are more advanced than methods of assessing flood consequences and there is a lack of comparable flood damage data to build damage models. Pluvial flood damage, caused by heavy rainfall that urban drainage systems can’t cope with, is less researched than river and coastal flood damage. This research contributes to knowledge of pluvial flood damage assessments (FDA) using a three-pronged approach of literature review, expert questionnaires, and case studies. A literature review is conducted to investigate the key types of FDA methods used, and approaches used to present FDA as a decision support tool. Results show that there are various FDA methods, with many studies focusing only on direct damage to buildings. Infrastructural damage, intangible damage to health and the environment, and indirect damage incurred by flooding are comparatively underrepresented. For a broader perspective, a questionnaire is distributed to flood risk experts asking them to rate the importance of various flood risk components on an ordinal 1-5 scale, and whether they prefer a cost-benefit (CBA) or multi-criteria analysis (MCA) for presenting results. Results show that experts emphasize the importance of infrastructural and intangible damages and prefer an MCA approach. Combined with literature, questionnaire results are used to develop a framework for distinguishing simple, refined, and comprehensive FDA methods. Additionally, FDA for two European cities are performed from the bottom-up, demonstrating potential pluvial flood damages of €10 million in each city from a 60mm/1hour rainfall event. Results show that there are a few limitations in the FDA process regarding data consistency and the inclusion of infrastructural and intangible damages. Flood risk assessments (FRA) are vital for spreading awareness and incubating action to reduce flood risks. So, considerable effort is needed in collecting data to further understanding of flood risks and help secure a safer future. | |
