Abstract
Flooding is one of the most devastating natural events and leads to enormous and recurring loss of life, properties, and resources around the globe. With climate change and accelerating urbanization, flood disasters in China have increasingly affected the sustainable development of metropolitan areas. Risk assessment is an essential step in flood management and disaster mitigation, which provide a quantitative measure of flood risk. However, the difficulty of flood risk zoning is dealing with the uncertainty of the evaluation process and the complicated non-linear relationship between indicators and risk levels. To address this issue, a fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) method based on combined weight (CW) was utilized in this paper to generate flood risk maps at a grid-scale (1 × 1 km). For the case study in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei metropolitan area (BTH) in China, fourteen indicators were selected to construct the flood risk assessment model based on the FSE approach integrated with ArcGIS. The research demonstrates that moderate, high, and very high risk zones are distributed in the southeast fluvial plain of the BTH area, accounting for 31.36% of the total land area. Meanwhile, low and very-low risk zones occupy 68.64% of the total land area, and are primarily located in the high plateau and mountain regions in the northwest. We analyzed the risk level of each county and proposed risk mitigation measures based on field investigations. The verified risk assessment results were spatially consistent with the historical flood disaster records and loss positions, indicating the accuracy and reliability of the risk assessment map using the FSE approach. Compared with the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) TAR (Third Assessment Report) and AR5 (Fifth Assessment Report) methods, FSE has significant advantages in handling uncertainty, complexity, and the non-linear relationship between indices and risk grades. This study provides a novel quantitative method for flood risk assessment in metropolitan areas and practical implications for urban flood management.
Highlights
Flooding is generally considered to be one of the most common and destructive natural disasters, and has been responsible for major losses to human and social economies [1,2]
We proposed a fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) method based on combined weight (CW)
The main objectives of this study are to develop a flood risk assessment model for metropolitan areas based on the FSE approach, to verify the feasibility of the results using historical flood data and casualty data, to put forward a combined weight (CW) method based on subjective (AHP) and objective (EW) weighting methods to improve the scientificity of weight distribution, and to generate risk maps of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei metropolitan area (BTH) area from a grid (1 × 1 km) and propose corresponding mitigation measures combined with field investigations at the regional level
Summary
Flooding is generally considered to be one of the most common and destructive natural disasters, and has been responsible for major losses to human and social economies [1,2]. Acceleration of urbanization and intense human activities has led to dramatically increased flood risks in the past few decades [4,5,6]. Floods have become a major threat to the sustainable development of metropolitan regions in China [14]. Within this context, identifying high risk areas at the regional level and adopting substantive optimum flood management strategies is of considerable significance to metropolitan areas
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