Abstract
Climate sciences foresee a future where extreme weather events could happen with increased frequency and strength, which would in turn increase risks of floods (i.e. the main source of losses in the world). The Mediterranean basin is considered a hot spot in terms of climate vulnerability and risk. The expected impacts of those events are exacerbated by land-use change and, in particular, by urban growth which increases soil sealing and, hence, water runoff. The ultimate consequence would be an increase of fatalities and injuries, but also of economic losses in urban areas, commercial and productive sites, infrastructures and agriculture. Flood damages have different magnitudes depending on the economic value of the exposed assets and on level of physical contact with the hazard. This work aims at proposing a methodology, easily customizable by experts’ elicitation, able to quantify and map the social component of vulnerability through the integration of earth observation (EO) and census data with the aim of allowing for a multi-temporal spatial assessment. Firstly, data on employment, properties and education are used for assessing the adaptive capacity of the society to increase resilience to adverse events, whereas, secondly, coping capacity, i.e. the capacities to deal with events during their manifestation, is mapped by aggregating demographic and socio-economic data, urban growth analysis and memory on past events. Thirdly, the physical dimension of exposed assets (susceptibility) is assessed by combining building properties acquired by census data and land-surface characteristics derived from EO data. Finally, the three components (i.e. adaptive and coping capacity and susceptibility) are aggregated for calculating the dynamic flood vulnerability index (FVI). The approach has been applied to Northeast Italy, a region frequently hit by floods, which has experienced a significant urban and economic development in the past decades, thus making the dynamic study of FVI particularly relevant. The analysis has been carried out from 1991 to 2016 at a 5-year steps, showing how the integration of different data sources allows to produce a dynamic assessment of vulnerability, which can be very relevant for planning in support of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.
Highlights
Climate sciences foresee a future where extreme weather events could happen with increased frequency and strength as a consequence of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
We can notice a sensitive decrease of flood vulnerability index (FVI) values in time, indicating that some of the changes occurred to society or to the physical environment had a positive effect on vulnerability
One of the novelties of the method is the proposed multi-temporal combination of both census and earth observation (EO) data, which contributes to the understanding of the dynamic evolution of vulnerability over time and makes it possible to go beyond the limited time resolution of census surveys, which for Italy comes every ten years
Summary
Climate sciences foresee a future where extreme weather events could happen with increased frequency and strength as a consequence of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate change would favour extreme precipitations to occur with higher frequency and intensity, causing more riverine, coastal and flash floods, which are already the main source of losses in the world (UNISDR 2015). The higher probability of these events to happen, coupled with the effects of landuse change and, in particular, of urban growth that increases soil sealing and, water runoff, in turn determines increased potential impacts (Kundzewicz et al 2014; Slater et al 2015; Viero et al 2019; Winsemius et al 2016). The expected consequences are an increase of fatalities and injuries, and of economic losses in urban areas, commercial and productive sites, infrastructures and agriculture, and they depend on the specific vulnerability of the area hit by the event. Two major conceptualizations of vulnerability can be found in the literature (USAID 2014): contextual vulnerability, focusing on the factors that define the ability to withstand and recover from a shock, and outcome vulnerability combining “information on potential climate impacts and on the socio-economic capacity to cope and adapt.” (Füssel 2010; O’Brien 2007)
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