Pieter Deckers

Flood Risk Management in Flanders: Past Developments and Future Challenges

This paper presents the state of the art of flood risk management in Flanders, a low-lying region in the northern part of Belgium which is vulnerable to flooding. Possible flood hazard sources are not only the many rivers which pass through the Flemish inland, but also the North Sea, which is sensitive to the predicted sea level rise and which can affect large parts of the Flemish coastal area. Due to the expected increase in flood risks in the 21st century, the Flemish government has changed its flood management strategy from a flood control approach to a risk-based approach. Instead of focusing on protection against a certain water level, the objective now is to assure protection against the consequences of a flood, while considering its probability. In the first part, attention is given to the reasoning and functioning of the risk-based approach. Recent improvements to the approach are discussed, as well as the GIS-implementation of the entire model. The functioning of the approach is subsequently demonstrated in two case studies. The second part of the paper discusses future challenges for the flood risk management in Flanders. The driving force behind these challenges is the European Directive on the assessment and management of flood risks, which entered into force in 2007. The Flemish implementation of the directive is discussed and situated in the European landscape. Finally, attention is given to the communication of flood risks to the general public, since the “availability” of flood risk management plans is among the requirements of the EU Floods Directive.

Marine Regions: Towards a Global Standard for Georeferenced Marine Names and Boundaries

GIS has become an indispensable tool for managing and displaying marine spatial data. However, a unique georeferenced standard of marine place names and boundaries has yet to be established. As such, an online, open-access, standardized, hierarchical list of geographic names, that is, Marine Regions, has been developed, linking each of these names to information and maps of the geographic location. The objectives are to capture all geographic marine names worldwide, including ocean basins, seas, seamounts, sandbanks, ridges, bays, and other marine geographical place names and attributes, and to display univocally the boundaries of marine biogeographic or other managed marine areas in order to facilitate marine data management, marine (geographic) research and the management of marine areas. Marine Regions is freely available at http://www.marineregions.org.

A GIS tool for flood risk analysis in Flanders (Belgium)

In recent decades, the low-lying Flanders region (Belgium) has fallen victim to numerous flood events, causing substantial damage to buildings and infrastructure. In response to this, the Flemish government proposed a new approach that considers the level of risk as method of safety measurement. Using geographical information systems, this evolution has led to a comprehensive risk methodology, and more recently to the development of a flood risk assessment tool called LATIS. By estimating the potential damage and the number of casualties during a flood event, LATIS offers the possibility of performing risk analysis in a fast and effective way. This paper presents a brief overview of the currently used methodology for flood risk management in Flanders and its implementation in the LATIS tool. The usefulness of this new tool is demonstrated by a sequence of risk calculations, performed in the framework of climate change impacts on flood risk in Flanders.

Coastal flood risks and seasonal tourism: analysing the effects of tourism dynamics on casualty calculations

Since coastal tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors of tourism industry, coastal areas have become increasingly vulnerable in the case of flooding. While in recent years a number of different methods have been put forward to map coastal flood risks, the implications of tourism dynamics for the assessment of human casualties has remained largely overlooked in these models. This chapter examines to what extent the ignorance of (residential) coastal tourism may bias the calculations of human casualties. To this end, a case study has been conducted on the Belgian coast. Both the dynamic nature of coastal tourism and the behaviour of residential tourists in storm surge scenarios are considered. The results of this study show that including tourism dynamics in flood risk management is justified and appropriate, depending on the tourist attractiveness of the flood-prone area and its temporal fluctuations.