Unraveling Long-Term Flood Risk Dynamics Across the Murray-Darling Basin Using a Large-Scale Hydraulic Model and Satellite Data

Abstract

River floods are one of the most devastating extreme hydrological events, with oftentimes remarkably negative effects for human society and the environment. Economic losses and social consequences, in terms of affected people and human fatalities, are increasing worldwide due to climate change and urbanization processes. Long-term dynamics of flood risk are intimately driven by the temporal evolution of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Although needed for effective flood risk management, a comprehensive long-term analysis of all these components is not straightforward, mostly due to a lack of hydrological data, exposure information, and large computational resources required for 2-D flood model simulations at adequately high resolution over large spatial scales. This study tries to overcome these limitations and attempts to investigate the dynamics of different flood risk components in the Murray-Darling basin (MDB, Australia) in the period 1973–2014. To this aim, the LISFLOOD-FP model, i.e., a large-scale 2-D hydrodynamic model, and satellite-derived built-up data are employed. Results show that the maximum extension of flooded areas decreases in time, without revealing any significant geographical transfer of inundated areas across the study period. Despite this, a remarkable increment of built-up areas characterizes MDB, with larger annual increments across not-flooded locations compared to flooded areas. When combining flood hazard and exposure, we find that the overall extension of areas exposed to high flood risk more than doubled within the study period, thus highlighting the need for improving flood risk awareness and flood mitigation strategies in the near future.

Does the Nature of Floods Matter in the Risk Perception of Households? A Comparative Assessment among the Rural Households Prone to Flash and Riverine Floods in Pakistan

“…According to WHO (2022) [23], flash floods are among the deadliest disasters worldwide, with more than 5000 annual lives lost and substantial impacts on the economy, environment, and society. Flash floods also account for almost 85% of cases of flooding and have the highest mortality rate among different flooding types [24] and compared to riverine floods, which affect wider areas but result in low prevention of human fatalities [24]. The main difference between a flash flood and riverine floods is the short basin response time to rainfall, which provides a very short lead time for the detection, forecasting, and warning of a flash flood [25].…”

Evaluation Model of Regional Comprehensive Disaster Reduction Capacity under Complex Environment

“…However, in practice, geological disasters are uncertain and random, so it is necessary to evaluate the losses caused by geological disasters by dynamic simulation. In this study, through multisource data fusion and key mechanism research, the technical system of risk dynamic assessment of debris flow geological hazards was established, and the risk dynamic assessment of debris flow geological hazards was carried out, which deepened the research on the formation mechanism of debris flow hazards, broadened the application fields and methods of risk assessment of geological hazards, and supplemented the shortcomings and defects of the existing assessment contents [ 1 ]. It provides a new idea and method for the study of geological disaster risk in China and has certain theoretical significance.…”