An Assessment of Flooding Risk Using Flash Flood Index in North Korea - Focus on Imjin Basin -

Abstract

The most of natural disasters that occur in North Korea are flood, typhoon and damage from heavy rain. The damage caused by those disasters since the mid-1990s is aggravating North Korea’s economic difficulties every year. By recognizing the seriousness of the damages from the floods, the North Korean government has carried out the river maintenance, farmland restoration, land readjustment and afforestation projects since the last-1990s, but it has failed preventing the damages. In order to estimate the degree of flood risk regarding damage from chronic floods that occur inveterately in North Korea, this research conducted an additional simulation for rainfall-runoff analysis to reflect the characteristics of the ungauged area that make foreign countries hard to obtain the hydrological data and do not open the topographical data to public. In addition, this research estimates the degree of flood risk by selecting the factors of the hazard, exposure and vulnerability by following the standards of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).