Socio-Economic Potential Impacts Due to Urban Pluvial Floods in Badalona (Spain) in a Context of Climate Change

Abstract

Pluvial flooding in Badalona (Spain) occurs during high rainfall intensity events, which in the future could be more frequent according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In this context, the present study aims at quantifying the potential impacts of climate change for the city of Badalona. A comprehensive pluvial flood multi risk assessment has been carried out for the entire municipality. The assessment has a twofold target: People safety, based on both pedestrians’ and vehicles’ stability, and impacts on the economic sector in terms of direct damages on properties and vehicles, and indirect damages due to businesses interruption. Risks and damages have also been assessed for the projected future rainfall conditions which enabled the comparison with the current ones, thereby estimating their potential increment. Moreover, the obtained results should be the first step to assess the efficiency of adaptation measures. The novelty of this paper is the integration of a detailed 1D/2D urban drainage model with multiple risk criteria. Although, the proposed methodology was tested for the case study of Badalona (Spain), it can be considered generally applicable to other urban areas affected by pluvial flooding.

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

“…Pluvial flood impacts can be classified into tangible and intangible impacts and direct and indirect impacts [29]. In this study, socio-economic impacts produced by pluvial flooding have been assessed according to comprehensive and detailed methodologies carried out and implemented in previous investigations in several urban areas [29,30].…”

“…In the social field, for the assessment of the intangible impacts, human risk focuses on the safety of pedestrians and vehicles exposed to pluvial flooding events. Risk is defined as the combination of hazard and vulnerability according to the approach proposed by Turner et al [31] and implemented in previous studies [29,30]. According to this, hazard assessment is based on the severity and frequency of the hydrodynamic variables and is classified based on specific flood hazard experimental criteria regarding pedestrian and vehicular stability in urban flooded areas ( Figure 8) [27,[32][33][34].…”

“…On the other hand, in order to assess the vulnerability for vehicular circulation, the exposure for each urban street, expressed in terms of vehicular daily intensity, is considered. Based on this value, flood vulnerability regarding vehicular circulation is qualitatively scored and classified as low, medium and high, in a similar manner to pedestrian vulnerability [28][29][30].…”

“…Methods for risk determination can be qualitative or quantitative, with both having limitations. If we define risk as the probability or threat of a hazard occurring in a vulnerable area, flood risk can be assessed through a flood risk map related to a determined scenario and return period by combining hazard and vulnerability maps [29,30]. Pedestrians and vehicles are expected to be the most potentially affected by floods in Barcelona.…”

“…In this case, hazard and vulnerability maps are generally elaborated through specific criteria and indexes, and so risk maps will be created by multiplying the vulnerability index (1, 2 or 3, corresponding to low, medium and high vulnerability) by the hazard index (1, 2 or 3, corresponding to low, medium and high hazard). Finally, the total risk varies from 1 to 9, where higher levels indicate higher risk according to the following risk matrix (Figure 9) previously employed in other works [29,30].…”