Julien Ernst

Integrated Flood Risk Analysis for Assessing Flood Protection Strategies

The present chapter describes an end-to-end methodology for assessing flood protection strategies, including the whole methodological process from hydrological statistics to detailed 2D hydraulic modelling, damage calculation and flood risk evaluation. This risk-based approach serves as a component of a decision-support system (DSS) developed in Belgium for identifying cost-effective flood management strategies in the context of climate change. The DSS accounts for both hydraulic and socio-economic parameters to quantify the benefits (in terms of avoided risk) and the cost of each strategy. Besides reviewing fundamentals of flood risk assessment, including the inundation model and main concepts related to flood risk, a consistent methodology for micro-scale flood risk analysis is presented in detail, combining complementary sources of GIS information such as high resolution and high accuracy land use database as well as socio-economic datasets. Finally a case study on a main tributary of river Meuse in Belgium is described. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-907-1.ch012