Abstract
In Canada, flooding is the most common and costly natural hazard. Flooding events significantly impact communities, damage infrastructures and threaten public security. Communication, as part of a flood risk management strategy, is an essential means of countering these threats. It is therefore important to develop new and innovative tools to communicate the flood risk with citizens. From this perspective, the use of story maps can be very effectively implemented for a broad audience, particularly to stakeholders. This paper details how an interactive web-based story map was set up to communicate current and future flood risks in the Petite-Nation River watershed, Quebec (Canada). This web technology application combines informative texts and interactive maps on current and future flood risks in the Petite-Nation River watershed. Flood risk and climate maps were generated using the GARI tool, implemented using a geographic information system (GIS) supported by ArcGIS Online (Esri). Three climate change scenarios developed by the Hydroclimatic Atlas of Southern Quebec were used to visualize potential future impacts. This study concluded that our story map is an efficient flood hazard communication tool. The assets of this interactive web mapping tool are numerous, namely user-friendly mapping, use and interaction, and customizable displays.
Highlights
Flooding is the most common and costly natural hazard affecting Canadians today [1].Floods occur throughout the country, but most of the worst flooding events have happened in southern regions, affecting hundreds of thousands of people and costing billions of dollars in damage [2]
In order to visualize the extent of flooding events under different climate change scenarios, we developed a series of flood risk maps using GARI [21,22]
The information contained in this story map was organized to present the flood risk over the Petite-Nation River watershed based on increasingly severe discharge scenarios
Summary
Flooding is the most common and costly natural hazard affecting Canadians today [1].Floods occur throughout the country, but most of the worst flooding events have happened in southern regions, affecting hundreds of thousands of people and costing billions of dollars in damage [2]. In the spring of 2019, for instance, flooding in eastern Canada cost more than CAD 200 million in insured losses and damage to nearly 20,000 properties [4]. Despite such impacts, Canadians are largely unaware of the flood risk they face. Canadians need and want more information on how to be actively engaged in flood management and how to improve their resilience In this context, efforts are being made to reduce the impacts of flooding events by increasing public awareness through communication of flood hazards and popularization of flood risk reduction measures
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