Flood risk analysis in the Meuse river basin

peer reviewedThe goal of the study presented in the paper consists in understanding the vulnerability of economic systems to a modification of the hydrology due to climate change in the Meuse river basin. The latter extends over several regions in four different countries. A transnational approach is thus necessary to keep consistency throughout the international catchment. In this paper, we begin by illustrating how a strong collaboration between scientists and water authorities of the different parts of the basin has lead to a consistent approach for conducting flood risk analysis. Hazard modeling was conducted to get flood maps in the whole basin, considering various climate scenarios. In Wallonia, accurate hydraulic simulations were performed with the fully dynamic flow model WOLF2D entirely developed at the University of Liege (Erpicum et al., 2010). The outcomes of this inundation modeling constitute suitable inputs for the subsequent exposure analysis. The latter has been performed at a meso-scale using land use maps (CORINE) and geographic database (PLI), aggregated into a set of five damage categories. Recently developed damage functions, which are the key part of the vulnerability analysis, has been chosen in relation with the damage categories indentified in the exposure analysis. To determine the value of the assets, a monetary approach has been employed, with the purpose of assessing prices per square meter for each damage category. In this paper, the focus is set on comparing several approaches to calculate the specific price of the residential damage category in Wallonia, and to compare with an existing micro-scale approach (Ernst et al., 2010)