Title: Urban Flood Management: Towards a Flood Resilient Urban Environment

Authors: William Veerbeek¹, Chris Zevenbergen^1,2, Sebastiaan van Herk^3,4

1 Dura Vermeer Business Development, Kruisweg 835, 2132NG Hoofddorp, Netherlands

2 Department of Sustainable Urban Infrastructure, UNESCO-IHE, PO Box 3015, 2601 DA, Delft, Netherlands

3 Bax & Willems Consulting Venturing sl, UNESCO-IHE, C/Roger de LLúria120 Principal, 08037, Barcelona, Spain

4 Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Technical University Delft, Stevinweg 1, 2600 GA, Delft, Netherlands

Conference: Water Resource Systems Management under Extreme Conditions, June 4-5, Moscow, Russia

Abstract

Climate change acts as a trend-breaker as well as creating a larger variability in the occurrence of extreme events. This results in increasing degrees of uncertainty towards which traditional probability based flood management policies might not provide adequate responses. Furthermore, ongoing processes of urbanization (both expansion and densification) increase susceptibilities of asset concentrations to floods, thus increasing overall vulnerabilities of urban areas to an increasing degree. In this article we opt for an impact based urban flood management (UFM) by taking the consequences of urban floods as a starting point for the development of responses. Such a change requires the development of new tools that map and analyze flood impacts to a much more precise level than in common practice; the concentration, differentiation and complexity of the urban environment requires flood impacts to be estimated on a much higher level of detail. A first actual attempt to implement such methods has been in the UFM project at Dordrecht, the Netherlands. The project involves the assessment of (economic) flood impacts on the existing historical city as well as the development of new flood resilient areas capable of dealing with larger degrees of uncertainty about the occurrence of extreme flood events.