Abstract
Abstract. Flood hazard is increasing in frequency and magnitude in major South East Asian metropolitan areas due to fast urban development and changes in climate, threatening people's property and life. Typically, flood management actions are mostly focused on large-scale defences, such as river embankments or discharge channels or tunnels. However, these are difficult to implement in town centres without affecting the value of their heritage districts and might not provide sufficient mitigation. Therefore, urban heritage buildings may become vulnerable to flood events, even when they were originally designed and built with intrinsic resilient measures, based on the local knowledge of the natural environment and its threats at the time. Their aesthetic and cultural and economic values mean that they can represent a proportionally high contribution to losses in any event. Hence it is worth investigating more localized, tailored mitigation measures. Vulnerability assessment studies are essential to inform the feasibility and development of such strategies. In this study we propose a multilevel methodology to assess the flood vulnerability and risk of residential buildings in an area of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, characterized by traditional timber housing. The multiscale flood vulnerability model is based on a wide range of parameters, covering building-specific parameters, neighbourhood conditions and catchment area conditions. The obtained vulnerability index shows the ability to reflect different exposure by different building types and their relative locations. The vulnerability model is combined with high-resolution fluvial and pluvial flood maps providing scenario events with 0.1 % annual exceedance probability (AEP). A damage function of generic applicability is developed to compute the economic losses at individual building and sample levels. The study provides evidence that results obtained for a small district can be scaled up to the city level, to inform both generic and specific protection strategies.
Highlights
The Sendai Framework 2015–2030 clearly identifies both climate change and rapid urbanization as disaster risk drivers (UNISDR, 2015)
Accuracy of water routing is dependent on the digital terrain model (DTM) accuracy
River locations are defined by analysing the DTM
Summary
The Sendai Framework 2015–2030 clearly identifies both climate change and rapid urbanization as disaster risk drivers (UNISDR, 2015). As a consequence of this long timeframe, they might turn out to be inadequate, postponed or irreversible (Aerts et al, 2014), and in many cases they prove to be unsuitable for developing countries on economic and financial grounds (Inaoka et al, 2019) Nonstructural measures, such as measures at the building scale or small-scale urban rehabilitation measures, can provide faster flood risk mitigation, yielding improved adaptability, (Andjelkovic, 2001; Kang et al, 2009), more distributed benefits and, as a result, better governance (Tullos, 2018). Other non-structural measures, such as financial incentive and insurance, are not investigated in this study, as there is insufficient evidence of their implementation in the study area (Roslan et al, 2019)
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