Flood Vulnerability Assessment

An overview to Flood vulnerability assessment methods

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to review current knowledge on flood vulnerability assessment. Managing different risks with the aim of safety and wellbeing of people and their environment saving is one of the main purposes and responsibilities of city authorities worldwide. To managing these risks, vulnerability reduction and increasing resilience are significant approaches. One of the first actions for achieving this aim is managing risk by measuring vulnerability to identifying vulnerable areas (Takemoto, 2011). Conceptualizing flood vulnerability assessment

Flood risk

There are many definitions of risk. In most cases it has been

In each of these areas there are different methods for assessing flood risk and its vulnerability. The repetition of risk assessments after flood mitigation measures (both structural and non-structural measures) lets appropriate judgment of the efficiency of each measure and also leads to identify components of risk which need extra mitigation (T.Tingsanchali, 2012) Vulnerability and its concept in flood risk

One of the key elements in flood risk management and damage evaluation is flood vulnerability. There is a need to develop our understanding of the vulnerability because nowadays it is understood that vulnerability is the root cause of disasters. The field of vulnerability research embraces a collection of different definitions for vulnerability; United Nations described vulnerability as the degree of damage to a given items at risk caused by flood with determined amount and was expressed as a scale from 0-1 (no damage to total damage) (United nations, 1982).

The International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) described vulnerability is the incapability degree of managing climate change and sea-level rise impacts (IPCC, 1992). So many definitions of vulnerability appear in the literature. (Table1) shows some most important definition of

Flood vulnerability is the key element in flood risk assessment and damage evaluation. Researchers have developed many methods to assess flood vulnerability. However, despite increased knowledge about the vulnerability, flood risk is still very widespread. This leads to questions being raised about the efficiency of vulnerability assessments and their effect on flood mitigation and adaptation (Khan, 2012). As Flood vulnerability in an area depends on some environmental, economic, social and even political factors it is difficult to measure vulnerability (Jixi Gao, 2007). That means vulnerability is influenced by several factors including human settlements conditions, infrastructure, authorities policy and abilities, social imbalances, economic patterns, etc. So flood vulnerability is different for people in different condition (Pandey, Singh, & Nathawat, 2010). Human systems are vulnerable to floods because of three key aspects; exposure, susceptibility and resilience. Instance the vulnerability of urban area is reflection of the exposure and susceptibility of the city to flood risk and the resilience of that region to cope and recover from the flood effects (Smit,