Comparative Analysis of Flood Vulnerability Indicators by Aggregation Frameworks for the IPCC’s Assessment Components to Climate Change

Jong Seok Lee,Hyun Il Choi

doi:10.3390/app9112321

Abstract

As severe flood damages have been increasing due to climate change, the flood vulnerability assessment is needed in the flood mitigation plans to cope with climate-related flood disasters. Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report (IPCC TAR) presented the three assessment components, such as exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability for the vulnerability to climate change, several aggregation frameworks have been used to compile individual components into the composite indicators to measure the flood vulnerability. It is therefore necessary to select an appropriate aggregation framework for the flood vulnerability assessments because the aggregation frameworks can have a large influence on the composite indicator outcomes. For a comparative analysis of flood vulnerability indicators across different aggregation frameworks for the IPCC’s assessment components, the composite indicators are derived by four representative types of aggregation frameworks with all the same proxy variable set in the Republic of Korea. It is found in the study site that there is a key driver component of the composite indicator outcomes and the flood vulnerability outcomes largely depend on whether the key component is treated independently or dependently in each aggregation framework. It is concluded that the selection of an aggregation framework can be based on the correlation and causality analysis to determine the relative contribution of the assessment components to the overall performance of the composite indicators across different aggregation frameworks.

Highlights

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have reported that a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be one of the main causes of climate change, as represented by global warming and it has accelerated frequent and intense disasters in many countries [1,2,3]
The IPCC’s three assessment components are independently aggregated with equal weights for FVI1 in Equation (1), or the potential impact as a function of exposure and sensitivity components is compiled with the lack of adaptability for FVI2 in Equation (2), livelihood vulnerability as a sum of exposure and lack of adaptability is compiled with sensitivity for FVI3 in Equation (3), or internal factor as an average of sensitivity and lack of adaptability is compiled with exposure for FVI4 in Equation (4)
As for the data characteristics of the IPCC’s three primary components for the study site, the data distribution of the exposure component was relatively spread out over the study site while the other two components had skewed data distributions where the high level or low level values were concentrated in most metropolitan areas for sensitivity data or lack of adaptability data, respectively

Summary

Introduction

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have reported that a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be one of the main causes of climate change, as represented by global warming and it has accelerated frequent and intense disasters in many countries [1,2,3]. There has been a continuous rise in intense climate-related disasters mainly floods and storms worldwide [4]. Of all recorded events; they affected the largest number of people at more than two billion people; and storms were the costliest type of disaster amounting to US$ 1300 billion in recorded damage. Such floods have been aimed at reducing the risk of damage and frequency through mainly various

Objectives

Results

Conclusion