The Community Page on Flood Resilience and Urban Flood Management

UFM closing event a success

Last Updated (Wednesday, 22 October 2008 13:10) Written by Sebastiaan van Herk Wednesday, 22 October 2008 10:56

On October 8th, the closing event for the UFM Dordrecht project was celebrated. The project team and the steering committee gathered with other interested professionals in Dordrecht. The project team, amongst whom were 3 FRG members, presented its most appealing results. The city Alderman Van Steensel and Living with Water executive and project officer Nijburg stressed the strategic importance of these results and the partnerships created. Afterwards all drank to this successful project and collaboration and already discussed a variety of follow up opportunities being prospected at this moment. The celebration took place in an historical building on the Voorstraat in Dordrecht. A special location for UFM as this building itself is part of the city defence structure to which flood barriers can be attached. The Voorstraat, a dyke, needs to be strengthened the coming years to be at ‘Delta height’ and to be climate proof. Something for the UFM consortium and FRG to pick up…..?

UFM-Dordrecht on Dutch Television

Last Updated (Wednesday, 29 October 2008 13:18) Written by William Veerbeek Wednesday, 22 October 2008 09:28

The UFM-Dordrecht project will feature in the Dutch TV-series “NL onder Water” (The Netherlands under Water) which is to be broadcasted on Tuesday October 28th. The series aim to bring the problem of climate change and its effect on the water cycle to a broader audience. While Chris Zevenbergen discussed the broader implications (e.g. flood risk) of climate changes, William Veerbeek focused on the developed flood damage model which is used to test the design proposals.

Strengthening flood management education

Last Updated (Wednesday, 15 October 2008 10:00) Written by William Veerbeek Wednesday, 15 October 2008 09:45

Professor Erik Pasche, from the University of Hamburg-Harburg, focused its first lecture at UNESCO-IHE on software development for flood risk management. Professor Pasche will be lecturing as visiting Professor for the institute in the coming years. This collaboration with the University of Hamburg will be extended to the area of research in flood resilience and urban flood management.

In recent years, Europe has felt the effects of increased river flooding. In order to adapt to increasing risks, cities have to adapt housing and business to climate change. Flood defense is not the right approach, points Professor Pasche: “risk management understood as the application of knowledge to prevent, adapt and learn to live with floods is the right line to follow.

Risk management should start with a flood risk map developed on the basis of fluvial flows, vulnerability & exposure indexes and consequences’ assessments. Of course, this requires the development of mathematical models. Nevertheless, Professor Pasche emphasized that “engineers need to see the limits of models. There is reality and there are models, which are only a simplification of reality”. “Once we understand that, we are ready to use interface models adaptable to reality”. Integration of models, “building a pyramid instead of bungalows”, is the way forward.

Based on these premises, the hydrology team of the University of Hamburg developed an open source application for geospatial modelling and simulation. Kalypso is developed to be a user friendly tool for GIS-based modelling and simulation of hydrological and hydraulic numerical models. Thanks to a generic approach one can use the platform to handle models of arbitrary nature.

Dutch Japan Design Workshop

Last Updated (Tuesday, 22 July 2008 17:08) Written by William Veerbeek Tuesday, 22 July 2008 17:03

William Veerbeek and Chris Zevenbergen took part in the Dutch Japan Design workshop in Tokyo, Japan. The focus of this workshop was to exchange knowledge on especially urban flooding issues in the face of climate change. One of the most important observations was the difference in exposure towards natural hazard impact. While for the Netherlands climate change seems to pose fundamentally new challenges which urges for an increase of flood resiliency instead of exclusively putting efforts on flood protection, the ongoing struggle against earthquakes, typhoons, tsunami’s and urban floods within Japan isn’t faced by a fundamental changes caused by climate change. Factors like uncertainty, extreme events and flash floods are nothing new to the Japanese and are absorbed by a comprehensive set of response and recovery measures. While in the Netherlands almost all efforts are put into flood prevention, the Japanese implementation of flood risk map distribution, emergency response plans, evacuation and post-flood recovery measures is much to be learned from. A striking example is the existence of an agreement between food stores and local government to ensure food supply during a state of emergency; a typical example of non-structural measures that increase the resiliency towards flood impacts. Although type and characteristics of natural hazards, urban density, available resources and many other factors prevent direct adoption of measures, the extensive experience and knowledge existing in Japan created an experience which should lead to new research topics and creative solutions currently left out from current debate.