<p>Flooding is among the leading climatic threats to people&#8217;s livelihoods, affecting development prospects worldwide. While the danger is already substantial, climate change and rapid urbanization in flood zones will likely further drive-up flood risks. &#160;</p> <p>The support from flood risk assessment studies, which quantify the impacts of hazardous events on the built environment, economy and society, is fundamental for defining and implementing strategies to manage and reduce flood risk effectively. However, according to the typology of considered assets, there are different methodologies for flood risk assessment. While for direct physical and monetary dimensions, the scientific community offers a variety of widely used models, the application of models beyond these dimensions is much less frequent, and the selection and implementation of a model for estimating indirect losses or impacts for a given application case are not straightforward.</p> <p>This work presents the lesson learnt from the recent updating process of the Flood Risk Management Plan of Po River District Authority carried out in the context of the MOVIDA project ((https://sites.google.com/view/movida-project, 2022), in compliance with the European Floods Directive (2007/60/EC). The analysis spread across the following assets: residential buildings, crops, dairy farms, commercial and industrial sectors, strategic facilities, roads and railways, cultural heritage, environment and population. In particular, this study critically examines and discusses the needs and challenges faced by the research consortium to implement a comprehensive impact. Furthermore, the major bottlenecks for the different assets are explored across the standard dimensions: state of art, data availability and openness, spatial/temporal resolution and scale, methodology framework and implementation.</p>
<p>In a climate change framework extreme natural events are going to occur more frequently and intensively as a result of global warming. Therefore, the effects and consequences of climate-related natural hazards, such as flooding, heatwaves, drought, landslides and others, have the potential to become more disastrous and extensive. Consequences of such events are of particular concern considering that today&#8217;s societies are interconnected in complex and dynamic socio-technological networks and, hence, dependent more than before on Critical Infrastructures (CI) systems (such as transport, energy, water, ICT systems, etc.). Furthermore, there are also events of Natural Hazards Trigger Technological Disasters (also known as NaTech events), whereby an industrial accident caused by a natural event could affect people, the environment, and other facilities and systems. This work reviews studies in the fields of risk assessment of CI systems affected by natural hazards and NaTech events.</p><p>This study identifies and classifies: the methodologies applied (qualitative or quantitative), the type of infrastructures exposed (transport, electricity, oil, gas, water and waste water and telecommunications systems, industrial or nuclear plant) and hazard considered (flood, earthquake, lighting, landslide, avalanche, storm surge, heat and cold waves, wind), the scale of application and the level of spatial resolution.</p><p>The work provides a comparison of the scientific studies, the objectives and analysis methods to assess risk employed in the fields of CI systems and NaTech events in order to highlight similarities and differences and to guide the most suitable approach for each application case.</p>
<p>The European "Floods Directive" requires European River district authorities to create flood damage and risk maps, but the process of assessing flood damage is complex and lacks established methods. Flood risk assessment also requires an understanding of how industrial equipment is vulnerable to flood events and the potential for toxic releases in such scenarios. In this study a practical case is presented regarding multicomponent flood risks in the Secchia River catchment, a tributary of the Po River, and proposes a new risk chain model for evaluating the environmental impact of soil and groundwater contamination in the event of a flood caused by the failure of storage tanks containing hazardous materials. The model is demonstrated using an illustrative case and shown to be a useful tool for managing the risk of such events. Our methodology presents a multi-component model for assessing environmental risk resulting from technological accidents triggered by natural disasters. In particular, we focus on the failure of storage tanks containing hazardous materials due to flooding. The proposed method first evaluates the probability of tank failure under defined flood conditions, including flood height, velocity, and probability of occurrence. To simplify the analysis, we consider all tanks to be unanchored atmospheric storage tanks. The final output of the method for each tank is a monetary estimation of the hypothetical costs for environmental remediation after tank failure, including the contamination of soil and groundwater by the spilled liquid. Our methodology proposed a conservative approach by assuming that all stored liquids are contaminants and by using a fixed value for the density of the stored liquid.</p><p>To evaluate the probability of tank failure, it has been considered four types of failure dynamics: buckling, displacement, floating and overturning. The tank failure assessment is based on our recent study that developed vulnerability different dynamic models for unanchored steel atmospheric tanks. Our methodology not only evaluates the probability of tank failure during flood events, but also analyses the potential consequences of failure, including direct damages to the tank and costs associated with recovering the spilled product and mitigating contamination in the affected area. The results of this study can be used to develop strategies for minimizing the risks of tank collapse during flood events and to increase awareness of potential NaTech risks. The ultimate goal of this study is to create a comprehensive procedure for evaluating and comparing the dynamics of tank collapse during flood events, including the potential environmental consequences, and providing risk managers with a full understanding of the risks associated with tank failure during flooding, including potential NaTech risks.</p><p>&#160;</p>
<p><span>The estimation of flood damage plays a key role for planning and implementing flood risk prevention and mitigation measures. While many contributions can be found in the scientific literature about inundation damage to buildings and infrastructures, estimation of losses to the agricultural sector is currently poorly discussed. Even if different conceptual or physically based models have been proposed for the agricultural sector as well, studies testing their application to real cases are still not sufficiently abundant due to the difficulties in finding appropriate inundation and damage data. The present work attempts to contribute in this matter by investigating the impacts of a recent inundation event: the selected case study is the flood event occurred the 6<sup>th</sup> December 2020 in Northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna region), caused by the formation of a breach on the right levee of the Panaro River. The area is mainly devoted to agriculture, with farmers growing prevalently winter wheat, sorghum and forage crops, such as alfalfa. The inundation footprint has been reproduced by means of a detailed 2D hydraulic model settled with HEC-RAS software (v. 6.0). The model focuses on the accurate reproduction of water depth and permanence required for the estimation of damages to agriculture activities. Model validation refers to different observed data: (a) inundation extent, (b) maximum water depth and (c) duration of water presence; data has been collected from various sources: remote sensing images, surveys to local land owners and interviews to authorities involved in the inundation management. Although representative of a preliminary investigation, the study provides additional insights towards a better estimation of potential impacts of inundation events on agriculture activities. </span></p>
<p>Climate change and subsidence will likely have a significant role to increase coastal flooding risk. The socio-economic impact of inundations can be very relevant, and, in a context of climate change, it is necessary to develop effective methods for assessing coastal flood hazard suitable for large-scale studies. This work focuses on the application of a new modelling approach for mapping flooding hazard for future scenarios characterized by sea level rise and ground lowering due to subsidence. The flood intensity index approach (Iw, Dottori et al. 2015) will be used to quantitatively evaluate the flood extent. This recent methodology allows to create reliable scenarios with low computational costs. The effects of the storm surge are assessed using a base scenario corresponding to 100 years return period event. IW inputs are represented by water height set as storm level plus a part of wave height. The scenarios will be created by quantitatively combining IPCC sea level rise projections with subsidence data that will be compared to high-resolution digital terrain models. The study area of this work is the &#8764;205 km long coastal plain of Northern Italy, from Venice to Rimini, composed of low-lying sandy beaches and which includes the Po delta area. The coast is characterized by large portions of the territory below mean sea level and by geological features made by recent quaternary sediments which have a natural subsidence rate. In the past (1960-1980) the subsidence rate had an exceptional increase caused by excessive groundwater withdrawal for agricultural and industrial activities, human consumption and by natural gas extraction.</p>
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