WIT Press


Urban Flood Mitigation: Sustainable Options

Price

Free (open access)

Volume

129

Pages

11

Page Range

299 - 309

Published

2010

Size

2201 kb

Paper DOI

10.2495/SC100261

Copyright

WIT Press

Author(s)

D. Serre, B. Barroca & Y. Diab

Abstract

Cities have started to anticipate the effects of global warming dealing with flood management. Indeed, it seems that this last decade, flood risk has increased and cities are facing on the one hand more frequent hazards, and on the other hand different types of flooding: fluvial, coastal, estuarial and pluvial. Most cities have to manage at least two of these flooding types. At the same time, flood risk management practices have changed step-by-step. Indeed, despite efforts made to maintain the flood defense assets well, we often observe failures leading to finally increase flood risk in protected areas during major flood events. Moreover, flood forecasting models, although they benefit from continuous improvements, remain partly inaccurate due to uncertainties populated all along data calculation processes. This means cities cannot continue to manage flood risk only by the use of flood defenses: sustainable options have to be designed to better mitigate the effects of flooding in urban area and in a long term strategy. Several European cities have suffered recent flooding events. It was the case for example in 2007 in United Kingdom. During this period, major events came from extreme rainfall and it appears that pluvial flood risk has become one of the most frequent events. In this context, flood risk can appear on every territory: cities have to develop some methods to take into account this new deal, options to achieve urban flood resilience. Some solutions that cities are using or will be able to set up in the near future will be described. Keywords: flood risk, resilience, urban environment. 1 Introduction The coming years will be focused on solutions to solve the storage of oil: this means that sustainable cities have to find a way to cut their oil dependencies. In

Keywords

flood risk, resilience, urban environment