Urban Population Flood Impact Applied to a Warsaw Scenario

Joanna Nowak Da Costa, Beata Calka and Elzbieta Bielecka
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Joanna Nowak Da Costa: Institute of Geospatial Engineering and Geodesy, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Military University of Technology, 00-908 Warsaw, Poland
Beata Calka: Institute of Geospatial Engineering and Geodesy, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Military University of Technology, 00-908 Warsaw, Poland
Elzbieta Bielecka: Institute of Geospatial Engineering and Geodesy, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Military University of Technology, 00-908 Warsaw, Poland

Resources, 2021, vol. 10, issue 6, 1-17

Abstract: The provision of detailed information on the impact of potential fluvial floods on urban population health, quantifying the impact magnitude and supplying the location of areas of the highest risk to human health, is an important step towards (a) improvement of sustainable measures to minimise the impact of floods, e.g., by including flood risk as a design parameter for urban planning, and (b) increase public awareness of flood risks. The three new measures of the impact of floods on the urban population have been proposed, considering both deterministic and stochastic aspects. The impact was determined in relation to the building’s function, the number of residents, the probability of flood occurrence and the likely floodwater inundation level. The building capacity concept was introduced to model population data at the building level. Its proposed estimation method, an offshoot of the volumetric method, has proved to be successful in the challenging study area, characterised by a high diversity of buildings in terms of their function, size and density. The results show that 2.35% of buildings and over 122,000 people may be affected by 500-year flooding. However, the foreseen magnitude of flood impact on human health is moderate, i.e., on average ten persons per residential building over the 80% of flood risk zones. Such results are attributed to the low inundation depth, i.e., below 1 m.

Keywords: urban population estimation; building capacity; flood impact; GIS modelling; flood mitigation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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