Flood Risk Assessment in the Po river basin under a Climate Change scenario

Abstract

River flooding is the most common natural disaster in Europe, causing deaths and huge amount of economical losses. Disastrous flood events are strictly related to extreme meteorological conditions; therefore, climate change is expected to have an important influence over the intensity and frequency of major floods. While approximated large-scale assessments of flood risk scenarios have been carried out by the European Joint Research Center, the knowledge of the effects at smaller scales is poor or incomplete, with few localized studies. Also, the methods are still coarse and uneven. The approach of this study starts from the definition of the risk paradigm and the elaboration of local climatic scenarios to track a methodology aimed at elaborating and combining the three elements concurring to the determination of risk: hydrological hazard, value exposure and vulnerability. Through the integration of these elements in a GIS environment, results are drawn for a pilot study in the Polesine area, where four simulated breach scenarios are compared. The outcomes of the analysis may be instrumental to authorities to increase the knowledge of possible direct losses and guide decision making. As future perspective, the employed methodology can also be extended at the basin scale through integration with the existent flood warning system to gain a real-time estimate of floods direct costs.