Assessment of Urban Flood Resilience in Barcelona for Current and Future Scenarios. The RESCCUE Project

Abstract

The results of recent climate projections for the city of Barcelona show a relevant increment of the maximum rainfall intensities for the period 2071–2100. Considering the city as a system of systems, urban resilience is strictly linked to the proper functioning of urban services and the knowledge of the cascading effects that may occur in the case of the failure of one or more critical infrastructures of a particular strategic sector. In this context, the aim of this paper is to assess urban resilience through the analysis of the behavior of the main urban services in case of pluvial floods for current and future rainfall conditions due to climate change. A comprehensive flood risk assessment including direct, indirect, tangible and intangible impacts has been performed using cutting edge sectorial and integrated models to analyze the resilience of different urban services (urban drainage, traffic, electric and waste sectors) and their cascade effects. In addition, the paper shows how the information generated by these models can be employed to feed a more holistic analysis to provide a general overview of the city’s resilience in the case of extreme rainfall events. According to the obtained results, Barcelona could suffer a significant increase of socio-economic impacts due to climate change if adaptation measures are not adopted. In several cases, these impacts have been geographically distributed showing the specific situation of each district of the city for current and future scenarios. This information is essential for the justification and prioritization of the implementation of adaptation measures.

Increased Urban Resilience to Climate Change—Key Outputs from the RESCCUE Project

“…In this framework, some potential hazards for strategic urban services produced by a set of selected climate change pressures have been identified and selected depending on their significance and the interest in each research site (Table 3). The effects of these climate drivers on strategic urban services have been analyzed through detailed models and tools developed and calibrated within the project [11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…In terms of hazard analysis, for the case of Barcelona, the simulation results showed that climate change could significantly exacerbate flood hazard in the sectors of urban drainage, electricity, traffic and waste collection, while its effects on water quality (bathing water and river) seemed to be negligible [11,13]. Sea level rise analysis performed by GIS tools indicated moderate loss of beaches for the horizon of 2050 and 2100, although its effects should not affect critical infrastructures located in the vicinity of the coast.…”

Vulnerability Assessment of the Urban Rail Transit Network Based on Travel Behavior Analysis

“…For example, Ma [6] defined vulnerability as an adaptive function of the load capacity of stations and extreme weather conditions and analyzed the impact of extreme weather conditions on public transport networks. Others have viewed vulnerability to be related to the occurrence possibility of sudden events and have considered vulnerability as the product of the probability of URTN operation failure [7,8]. Sun [9] investigated the vulnerability of URTN operations using the relative failure probability.…”

Numerical and Experimental Approaches to Estimate Discharge Coefficients and Energy Loss Coefficients in Pressurized Grated Inlets

“…Adapting modern cities to face future changes, including climate changes, requires modification of the main urban services design requirements, such as improved drainage systems to cope with extreme rainfall intensity producing flood events [1][2][3][4][5]. As rainfall events become more extreme, each city requires a personalized solution to cope with the problem of undersized sewer networks and poor surface drainage systems [6].…”