Multiform flood risk in a complex future flooded world: Earth observation and complex systems for compound risk assessment
Wednesday Dec 02, UTC 17:00 to 17:55
Organizer: The World Bank Group
| Risk, and particularly flood risk, can be seen as the resultant of different forces acting on a complex system. Well-accepted and diffused frameworks describe the forces and elements of the system with hazard, exposure and vulnerability, components that are continuously under change over space and time, in many cases rapidly, and whose interactions determine the level of risk. For an efficient and adaptable risk management, all the elements of this complex system, together with their trajectories and changes, have to be considered for reliable damage estimations and risk analyses, allowing for an effective design of DRR measures and policies. Nonetheless, we live in a complex world where things often are even more complicated, with compound hazards acting on rapidly urbanizing areas, making the description of the forces and the domain where they act extremely difficult: floods can become multiform floods by combining with other types of hazards (e.g. heat-waves or pandemics) or different types of floods (e.g. riverine with coastal), land use can change from one month to the other (e.g. urban development), society can evolve rapidly (e.g. demography, education, etc.). How can we inform DRR measures and policies in such a complex world? New sources of data, -Earth Observation, social media and mobility data- are becoming important to describe this complex system, and new tools, -machine learning and AI, complex systems analysis and socio-hydrology, are supporting their analysis. Nonetheless, where hazards hit, things can be far from ideal. This session wants to investigate what are the new trends in data, tools and practices related to multiform floods in a rapidly changing environments, involving experts of data production, of tools development and of DRM in the field. We propose to have a panel of experts in different fields (socio-hydrology, complex systems, artificial intelligence, environmental economics, space technology) with a diverse cultural background, taking into account their country of origin (in order to represent the global environment of UR) and gender balance. Some potential speakers have been already contacted and we already have the availability of Prof. Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Uppsala University, an expert of socio-hydrology and complex systems, for a keynote presentation. |
