Impact of forecasted land use changes on flood risk in the Polish Carpathians

Marcin Szwagrzyk (), Dominik Kaim, Bronwyn Price, Agnieszka Wypych, Ewa Grabska and Jacek Kozak
Additional contact information
Marcin Szwagrzyk: Jagiellonian University
Dominik Kaim: Jagiellonian University
Bronwyn Price: Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL
Agnieszka Wypych: Jagiellonian University
Ewa Grabska: Jagiellonian University
Jacek Kozak: Jagiellonian University

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2018, vol. 94, issue 1, No 12, 227-240

Abstract: Abstract Flooding is a major environmental hazard in Poland with risks that are likely to increase in the future. Land use and land cover (LULC) have a strong influencing on flood risk. In the Polish Carpathians, the two main projected land use change processes are forest expansion and urbanization. These processes have a contradictory impact on flood risk, which makes the future impact of LULC changes on flooding in the Carpathians hard to estimate. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the projected LULC changes on future flood risk in the Polish Carpathians for the test area of Ropa river basin. We used three models of spatially explicit future LULC scenarios for the year 2060. We conduct hydrological simulations for the current state and for the three projected land use scenarios (trend extrapolation, ‘liberalization’ and ‘self-sufficiency’). In addition, we calculated the amount of flood-related monetary losses, based on the current flood plain area and both actual and projected land use maps under each of the three scenarios. The results show that in the Ropa river, depending on scenario, either peak discharge decreases due to the forest expansion or the peak discharge remains constant—the impact of LULC changes on the hydrology of such mountainous basins is relatively low. However, the peak discharges are very diverse across sub-catchments within the modeling area. Despite the overall decrease of peak discharge, there are areas of flow increase and there is a substantial projected increase in flood-related monetary losses within the already flood-prone areas, related to the projected degree of urbanization.

Keywords: LULC; LU modeling; Flood risk assessment; SCS CN; Carpathians (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11069-018-3384-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:94:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s11069-018-3384-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-018-3384-y

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().