Rindsfüser, Nele Barbara (2025). Monitoring systems for adaptive flood risk management. (Thesis). Universität Bern, Bern

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Abstract

Flood risk management aims to reduce risks, manage residual risks, and prevent new risks in order to strengthen resilience and contribute to the prevention of increasing flood losses. Climate change, land-use change, human intervention, and socio-economic development lead to dynamics in the main risk components - hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. The spatiotemporal evolution of flood risk poses challenges to flood risk management, necessitating continuous adaptation of risk management strategies. To enable adaptive flood risk management, it is necessary to understand and quantify the evolution of flood risk, and its components hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. A strategy to operationalize adaptive flood risk management is the establishment of a risk monitoring system that systematically identifies critical developments. However, a risk monitoring system (including changes of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) is currently lacking in both its conceptualization and implementation. This PhD thesis addresses this gap by undertaking the following three objectives: (i) to elaborate principles of flood risk monitoring, (ii) to evaluate the application of flood risk monitoring and (iii) to integrate variations in vulnerability into risk analysis to enhance the knowledge about the impact on flood risk and flood risk monitoring. The first paper distills the fundamental steps necessary for the elaboration of a flood risk monitoring system. A systematic literature review was conducted to identify and deepen the understanding of local and regional flood risk evolution studies. The synthesis of the literature review delineates the main objectives, key factors and methods that have been selected for the analysis of flood risk evolution and the results of the flood risk analyses. The findings of the review indicate that there is no universally applicable strategy for the monitoring of flood risk. Moreover, the heterogeneity of the approaches hampers comparability of results. Nevertheless, the review enables the formulation of conclusions concerning the monitoring of flood risk and the distillation of the principles of flood risk monitoring. The findings indicate that risk emerges from the interactions between the risk components (hazard, exposure, and vulnerability), thereby indicating that risk itself cannot be directly monitored. The integration of data and proxy data concerning evolving risk factors necessitates the implementation of methodologies such as data mining, data modeling, data analysis, and data combination. The principles of flood risk monitoring, outlined in this paper are as follows: repeated flood risk analyses consisting of the systematic measurement of factors influencing hazard, exposure, and vulnerability; modeling the risk components; and the combination of these components to quantify risk. The second paper evaluates the implementation of flood risk monitoring through a national case study of Switzerland, encompassing a 10-year data collection period. Data streams of hazard (continuously updated hazard maps), exposure (number of houses in potentially endangered areas), and vulnerability (degree of damage) were collected and analyzed to calculate risk (in terms of potential damage) evolution for each year between 2014 and 2023. The findings indicate that the flood risk in Switzerland has undergone distinct annual changes. These changes are accompanied by spatial variability in the evolution of the flood risk and its components across various administrative units. From 2014 to 2023, the total flood risk in Switzerland increased by 26%, the hazard area expanded by 32%, and the exposure grew by 35%. The disentangling of risk factors facilitates a more profound comprehension of the predominant drivers that increase or decrease risk. The selection of data and methods for the flood risk monitoring concept enabled the systematic quantification of annual flood risk at the national, cantonal, and municipal scale. Consequently, the monitoring of individual risk factors contributes to the observation of risk evolution, thereby validating the efficacy of the flood risk monitoring concept. Nevertheless, challenges persist regarding data availability and consistency, impeding effective flood risk monitoring. The third paper examines the quantitative knowledge concerning the implementation level and damage-reducing effects of property-level flood risk adaptation (PLFRA) measures. A local case study in the Swiss municipality of Burgdorf was conducted to collect data on PLFRA and incorporate this data into the flood risk analysis, which is based on a comprehensive risk modeling chain. The results demonstrate that neglecting PLFRA measures in the risk analysis leads to an overestimation of flood risk. The incorporation of PLFRA measures and their level of protection in the risk analysis reduced flood risk by 18%. Furthermore, the consideration of all protection levels resulted in a 23% reduction in flood risk. Additionally, a protection level of 0.5m for each building would reduce the risk by 50%. The results support the notion that adaptive flood risk management requires approaches that consider the spatiotemporal evolution of all risk components (hazard, exposure, and vulnerability). In conclusion, this doctoral thesis provide a critical perspective on flood risk evolution and introduces principles of flood risk monitoring that enhance the understanding of systemic risks and support the development of a flood risk monitoring concept. Based on these principles, a flood risk monitoring concept is evaluated to identify insights about benefits, challenges, limitations and key lessons to refine the framework and enhance the applicability for long-term flood risk monitoring. Based on the identified gap in the first and second study that vulnerability is often neglected in flood risk evolution analyses, we consider in a third study vulnerability mitigation in flood risk analysis to improve flood risk monitoring.

Item Type:	Thesis
Dissertation Type:	Cumulative
Date of Defense:	16 May 2025
Subjects:	500 Science > 550 Earth sciences & geology 900 History > 910 Geography & travel
Institute / Center:	10 Strategic Research Centers > Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR) 08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Geography
Depositing User:	Hammer Igor
Date Deposited:	05 Jun 2025 12:05
Last Modified:	05 Jun 2025 12:05
URI:	https://boristheses.unibe.ch/id/eprint/6275

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