H34E-02:
Floods and Societies: Dynamic Modeling

Wednesday, 17 December 2014: 4:15 PM
Giuliano Di Baldassarre1, Alberto Viglione2, Gemma Carr2, Linda Kuil Jr.2, Luigia Brandimarte1 and Guenter Bloeschl2, (1)Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, (2)Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
Abstract:
There is growing concern that future flood losses and fatalities might increase significantly in many regions of the world because of rapid urbanization in deltas and floodplains, in addition to sea level rise and climate change. To better anticipate long-term trajectories of future flood risk, there is a need to treat floodplains and deltas as fully coupled human-physical systems. Here we propose a novel approach to explore the long-term behavior emerging from the mutual interactions and feedbacks between physical and social systems. The implementation of our modeling framework shows that green societies, which cope with flooding by resettling out of floodplains, are more resilient to increasing flood frequency than technological societies, which deal with flooding by building levees. Also, we show that when coupled dynamics are accounted for, flood-poor periods could (paradoxically) be more dangerous than flood-rich periods.