Integrated Assessment of Natural Hazards and Climate Change Adaptation: I - The KULTURisk Methodological Framework

Abstract

A conceptual framework integrating different disciplines has been developed to comprehensively evaluate the benefits of risk prevention. Three main innovations are proposed with regards to the state of the art: (1) to include the social capacities of reducing risk, (2) to go beyond the estimation of direct tangible costs, and (3) to provide an operational solution to assess risks, impacts and the benefits of plausible risk reduction measures. The traditional risk metric in the physical sciences is the expected damage (direct tangible costs), which is defined as a function of hazard, vulnerability (physical) and exposure. The last element, exposure, provides the information to convert results into monetary terms. In the development of the KULTURisk Framework (KR-FWK), we considered several different pre-existing proposals, and we designed a new one as a conceptual model and also a flow-chart for the elaboration of information. The proposed KR-FWK is thus expected to provide: 1) an operational basis for multidisciplinary integration; 2) a flexible reference to deal with heterogeneous case studies and potentially various types of hazards; and 3) a means to support the assessment of alternative risk prevention measures including consideration of social and cultural dimensions. The project case studies of the process are expected to provide a quite diversified set of situations, allowing to consolidate the framework itself and to develop ad hoc tailored solutions for most common implementation cases.

An integrated approach of flood risk assessment in the eastern part of Dhaka City

“…The framework is shown in Figure 2. The detailed description of framework can be found in Giupponi et al (2013a) and Mojtahed et al (2013). In brief, risk is considered as the result of the combination of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability.…”

“…For example, the indicators for assessing flood risk are different from the indicators of seismic risk. As this work is focused on flood hazards, we referred to Giupponi et al (2013a) and Mojtahed et al (2013), who proposed a generalized list of indicators representing adaptive capacity, coping capacity and susceptibility. The most appropriate indicators for the study case were selected considering the data availability and the spatial extent of the study area.…”

“…A comprehensive summary of different category of damages is provided in Balbi et al (2013) and Giupponi et al (2013a). In order to determine the overall burden on a social and ecological system imposed by flood, considerations of these categories of damages are important.…”

“…Among indirect tangible costs, disruption of public services, disruption of traffic, induced production losses to agriculture and companies outside the flood-affected area, loss of tax revenue and costs associated with temporary housing of evacuees are important Giupponi et al 2013a). In the context of Dhaka City, induced production losses to garments industries are one of the main types of indirect tangible damages, as the importance of garments in the economy of Bangladesh is high (Islam et al 2013).…”

“…First, the assessment of flood risk includes the broader context considering not only physical factors, but also socio-economic factors. For assessing the combined effect of different physical and socio-economic variables, risk is conceptualized through a recently developed theoretical framework by Giupponi et al (2013a). Second, the risk assessment considers four categories of damages (direct tangible, direct intangible, indirect tangible and indirect intangible).…”