A unified framework for quantitative interdisciplinary flood risk assessment

Abstract:

Flood risk and impact assessment is a highly interdisciplinary task. Collaboration across disciplines is, unfortunately, often complicated by different perspectives of risk and approaches to risk assessment.

To establish a common ground for efficient treatment and communication of risk, we propose a “unified risk equation” that shall guide analysts in risk identification on a conceptual level and in (semi-)quantitative risk assessment on a mathematical level. We apply the source-pathway-receptor concept to derive a risk equation for spatially-distributed and dynamic systems. We start off with a general framing and then refine individual parts of the equation as much as needed. We will show how the individual terms of the unified risk equation explicitly relate to concepts of frequency, intensity, duration, exposure, vulnerability and asset worth. The rigorous mathematical treatment allows investigating the importance of risk factors and serves as a basis for risk management and reduction.

In this presentation, we demonstrate the applicability of our proposed framework with selected examples from river and urban flood risk. Beyond those examples, we have also already successfully applied the framework to many other disciplines. Users of the equation praise the structured common ground for discussion and highly recommend at least hypothetically applying this framework to gain a more unified understanding of the problem at hand.

We are confident that the discussion of our proposed framework will serve as a catalyst for interdisciplinary advances in flood risk assessment and other disciplines of civil and environmental engineering.