Innovations in Best Practices: Approaches to Managing Urban Areas and Reducing Flood Risk in Reggio Calabria (Italy)

Giuseppe Barbaro,Paula De Magalhães,Giandomenico Foti,Marcelo Miguez,Irene Occhiuto,Matheus Valadão,Matheus De Sousa,Anna Ribeiro Da Cruz Franco

doi:10.3390/su13063463

Giuseppe Barbaro, Paula De Magalhães + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su13063463

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Abstract

Urbanization increases imperviousness and reduces infiltration, retention, and evapotranspiration, frequently aggravating urban flooding due to greater runoff and higher and faster discharge peaks. Effective strategies to mitigate flood risks require a better understanding of the watershed dynamics and space to reverse the negative impacts. However, often cities do not have proper data sets to feed mathematical models that would be helpful in mapping water dynamics. Attempts to reduce flood risks have been made for decades by means of structural interventions but were frequently designed within the logic of a local scale, using limited available spaces and often merely shifting flooding downstream. Therefore, assessing urban floods requires a modeling approach capable of reflecting the watershed scale, considering interactions between hydraulic structures and urban landscape, where best practices and non-structural measures aim to improve community flood resilience through the reduction of social and financial costs in the long run. This paper proposes an integrated approach to analyze low impact development (LID) practices complemented by non-structural measures in a case study in southern Italy, supported by mathematical modeling in a strategy to overcome a context of almost no available data and limited urban open spaces.

Highlights

Observing the results provided by the drainage network representation of Storm Water Management Mode (SWMM) and the superficial flow representation of MODCEL will allow a wider range of representation capabilities to be covered, offering a more consistent range of results to support decisions regarding flood control design
The chosen models are SWMM, which addresses the representation of detailed storm drains, and MODCEL, a quasi-2D model that focuses on surface flow generation and its interactions with urban landscape and drainage systems
When simulating the proposed scenarios scenarios (SC1, SC2, and SC3), the flooding heights in Piazza della Pace reduced signifi(SC1, SC2, in Piazza della Pace reduced significantly in the cantly in theand firstSC3), two the LIDflooding scenariosheights and were completely mitigated with the complemenfirst two low impact development (LID) scenarios and were completely mitigated with the complementary discharge tary discharge capacity added to the system outfall

Summary

Introduction

More than half of the world population lives in urban areas, and this is an increasing trend. More people, assets, facilities, and goods are concentrated in cities and exposed to floods. Weather related disasters are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide, and floods represent 40% of the total natural disasters in the 21st century, when floods affected about 1.64 billion people, accounting for approximately 105 thousand casualties and reaching a total damage that exceeded half a billion dollars [1]. The world population reached 7.7 billion in 2019, and nearly 64 million people were affected by floods and major storms [1]. The approximate number of people exposed to floods around the world in 2018 was estimated as 1.2 billion, and up to 2 billion people

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