Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Assessment
For whom?
- Engineers who are interested in learning the quantitative risk assessment tools, techniques and methodologies.
- Managers, policymakers, and other professionals in the flood risk and coastal zone management sectors who do not necessarily have a technical background.
Prerequisites
We welcome participants from diverse backgrounds (engineering, managers, policy-makers) as long as they are ready to challenge boundaries and open to learning. You should be interested in the topic of flood and/or coastal erosion.
Dates, Fee, ECTS
Start: 20 November 2023
End: 08 December 2023
ECTS credit points: 5
Deadline IHE application: 19 October 2023 - 23.59 (CET)
Course fee: € 5250
VAT is not included in the course fee
Learning objectives
Upon completion, the participant should be able to:
- Setup quantification of risk as a computational problem and apply simulation models to estimate hazards in the context of flood and coastal erosion hazards.
- Calculate risk by combining hazards into suitable risk models.
- Communicate quantified risk information in understandable, but also actionable means.
- Interpret quantified risk information in a context-specific way together with the uncertainties.
Course content
The IPCC 6th assessment reports state with high confidence that urban/coastal flooding and coastal erosion risk will increase almost all over the world over the 21st century due to climate change.
While enormous investments are required to protect human life and assets, such investments are increasingly becoming difficult to access due to a combination of factors like (a) competing needs for (local) government investments and International funding, (b) lack of capacity at different levels to formulate flood/erosion risk management as a business proposition with return on investment and (c) substantial communication gap between what analysts produce as a result of complex risk analysis procedures and (lack of) understanding by policymakers of those outputs.
The 3-week short course addresses these three gaps covering theory, tools and hands-on modelling and quantification, risk communication and its interpretation. It covers the following type of flood and coastal risk contexts:
- Pluvial urban floods
- Fluvial floods
- Flooding in the coastal context (covering both 1&2) in the context of climate change
- Coastal erosion risk due to sea-level rise
We use modelling tools implemented in several case studies from different locations in the world to address the following topics:
- Quantitative risk assessment frameworks and approaches.
- External and internal determinants of risk (Climate change, local land-use change, system deterioration)
- Climate change-driven Flood hazard modelling
- Climate change-driven Coastal Erosion hazard modelling
- How to convert Hazard estimates to quantitative risk assessments
- Interpretation and communication of quantified risk information
- Understanding quantified risk information
We will conduct this course in a hands-on way, using group work with each participant group containing both participants with technical backgrounds (e.g. engineers) and non-technical (e.g. policymakers and managers). Each participant group will do hands-on exercises in the context of workshops while being guided by plenary lectures.
Whether you are from a technical (e.g. engineering) background or a non-technical one, you will have a meaningful learning experience in this course.