An Alternative Approach to Assess the Residential Population Resilience to Urban Flooding

L.D.C.H.N Kalpana,C.C Abenayake,P.N.P Wijayawardana,A.B Jayasinghe

doi:10.4038/faruj.v7i0.30

Abstract

Community resilience assessments and minimizing the anticipated disruptions to vulnerable communities, is a broad topic in disaster studies. In common practice, most of the indicator-based resilience assessment studies rely on statistical aggregation methods of tabular data collected for macro administrative units, as it is readily available in most of the countries. However, this method confronts severe drawbacks in converting such data into micro-scale geospatial units. To address those issues, this study proposes to utilize the Dasymetric Mapping Technique in the geospatial population resilience assessments, as it is capable of identifying the micro level impact to the population distribution as a pixel representation. In order to geospatially demonstrate the population exposure, the study has selected three major flooding events occurred in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The results revealed a great applicability of the proposed method as a statistical approach which estimates the exposed population by over 90% accuracy. Therefore, the proposed method is recommended to be utilized as an efficient tool of community resilience assessment as it is highly accurate in downscaling the spatial distribution of population data.

Highlights

Flooding is considered a global threat, as it disrupts the livelihood in many dimensions and makes a significant impact on the people, the economy and the environment
The proposed method is more suitable in downscaling the population estimation of urban flooding exposure, as it only evaluates the actual impact of the incident
The proposed method is applicable for applying in community resilience assessment to any natural or manmade incident, as it can precisely distinguish the direct impact to the residential population

Summary

Introduction

Flooding is considered a global threat, as it disrupts the livelihood in many dimensions and makes a significant impact on the people, the economy and the environment. It is estimated that 47% of flood and storm-related events have affected 2.3 billion people in the world during the last decade (1995 – 2015); (Wahlstrom & Guha-Sapir, 2015). Resilience building has become an important way for city planners and decision makers to manage flood risks (Abenayake, et al, 2016). Many global agendas such as Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for 2030, and the World Humanitarian Summit Commitments to Action and the New Urban Agenda emphasize the importance of such measures (UN-Habitat, 2017)

Methods

Results

Conclusion