Back to the future: assessing the damage of 2004 Dhaka flood in the 2050 urban environment

Abstract

Planning to make a city flood resilient needs proper assessment of future conditions. Urban growth models are being used as a planning tool for city development. Within the project Collaborative Research in Flood Resilience in Urban Areas (CORFU), flood management strategies suitable for cities with varied geographic and socio‐economic conditions have been developed. In the paper, we adopted urban growth model to project the possible future conditions of Dhaka City, the rapidly developing capital of Bangladesh. Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Himalayan Mountain range and experiences frequent flooding. In 2004 an extreme nationwide flood event occurred, which caused major damage to Dhaka City. If the same event were to occur in 2050, it can be expected that the damage would increase significantly. Through the application of the urban growth, hydraulic and damage assessment models, we were able to determine the damage that can be expected to happen in 2050. The paper also describes the key factors that are important to determine this impact and the associated uncertainties.

Understanding the NEEDS for ACTING: An integrated framework for applying nature-based solutions in Brazil

“…The framework was applied with a combination of spatial and participatory tools in Campina Grande (Brazil). Needs' analysis shows how the city faces many societal challenges such as flood risk in the current and future context, allied with the complex task of living in vulnerable and urbanised areas, societal challenges prevalent in developing countries (de Loyola Hummell et al 2016;Khan et al 2018;dos Santos et al 2021). In this sense, the findings show the spatial distribution of flooding in the current and future contexts, in which approximately 52% of the flooded areas in the CFS will have a flood increase in the FFS (2040) (Figure 3(a) and 3(b)).…”

A new flood risk assessment framework for evaluating the effectiveness of policies to improve urban flood resilience

“…In contrast, in Dhaka, urban sprawl is very much a pressing concern, and this pressure was included. More detail on the analyses are found in Velasco et al (2016) and Khan et al (2018). An important element of this research is that such frameworks can be applied to developed and developing countries, no matter the state of economic development or urban complexity.…”

From hazard to impact: flood damage assessment tools for mega cities

“…In the CORFU project, an UGM has been developed (Veerbeek et al 2015) to project future changes in land cover, based on historic LULC data and various terrain characteristics. The UGM also considers different drivers such as alternative growth rates, growth containment and zoning plans to produce possible future scenarios.…”

“…LULC classification is based on 30 m cell Landsat 5 TM data, using a maximum-likelihood multi-temporal land cover classification (Bruzzone and Serpico 1997) after which manual corrections were applied (Veerbeek et al 2015). Similar approach was also adopted by Corner et al (2014) for the urban sprawl analysis in Dhaka.…”

“…The total damage could increase to 2.78 billion BDT in 2050s, compared to 364 million BDT in the current situation, if the impact of urban growth on the hydraulic condition is not considered. The tools has been applied to take a multiple flood events with different probabilities, for both current and future scenarios, as inputs to determine the damage of each condition and the EADs as the integral risk assessment; the details can be found in Khan et al (2015). Meanwhile, the LULC can be replaced using different information such as population density, so that the same tool can be applied to assess the flood impacts on human health for the baseline and the future scenarios.…”