Ecosystems Services for Flood Risk Reduction

Ecosystems Services for Flood Risk Reduction:
^{A framework and case study for data-scarce study areas}

Floods are the most frequent and costly among all natural hazards, and flood-induced losses are expected to grow, driven simultaneously by climate-change and land-use conversion. While it has long been known that natural ecosystems can play a significant role in mitigating the risk of flooding, few tools exist to quantify these protective benefits, especially in data-poor contexts. As such, flood risk management insufficiently takes into account the role of landscapes and natural infrastructure.

In practice this means that
1) large-scale natural ecosystem depletion does not account for associated increase in flood-risk and the resulting impacts,
2) conservation efforts promoted through ecosystem services calculations often underestimate the true benefits by ignoring flood-protection capacity of natural ecosystems, and
3) flood mitigation measures are biased towards “grey infrastructure” whose protective capacity are easily calculated with engineering software.

This study aims to provide a standardised probabilistic flood risk analysis framework, with a robust and comprehensive hazard modeling process that can be used in data scarce areas, to allow users to analyse the contributions of green/natural infrastructures to flood risk mitigation. The framework aims to faciliate the cost-benefit analysis of nature-based solutions, and better comparisons between green and grey flood mitigation infrastructure.