The development of a flood damage assessment tool for urban areas

The Collaborative Research on Flood Resilience in Urban Areas (CORFU) project is funded by the European Commission to investigate the impact of flooding in cities and to develop strategies to enhance flood resilience. The project explores the impact of key drivers including urbanisation, socio-economic trends and climate change in eight European and Asian cities. The development of resilience strategies relies on a comprehensive assessment of flood impacts. These impacts can be categorised as tangible (those that can be measured in monetary terms) or intangible (such as health impacts that can be difficult to quantify. Flood hazard information (depth, extent, velocity, etc.) for different scenarios, obtained from hydraulic models, along with data on land use or cover, building features, infrastructure, and demographics are applied to determine these impacts. The nature and scale of the damage, the availability of required information, and the characteristics of case studies are taken into account to develop a generic and flexible flood damage assessment model that can be broadly applied to European and Asian cities. In this paper, Dhaka city is adopted to demonstrate the direct tangible damage assessment tool