Service Accessibility Risk (SAR) Assessment for Pluvial and Fluvial Floods in an Urban Context

Abstract

The development of strategies to adapt to and mitigate the potential adverse consequences of natural hazards requires support from risk assessment studies that quantify the impacts of hazardous events on our society. A comprehensive analysis of risk commonly evaluates the elements exposed to the hazard probabilistic scenarios and their vulnerabilities. However, while significant advances have been made in the assessment of direct losses, indirect impacts are less frequently examined. This work assesses the indirect consequences of two hydrologic hazards, i.e., pluvial and fluvial floods, in an urban context from a system perspective. It presents a methodology to estimate the services accessibility risk (SAR) that considers the accessibility of roads and the connection between providers and users of services in a city. The feasibility of the proposed approach is illustrated by an application to a pilot study in Monza city (northern Italy) considering pluvial and fluvial flood hazard with different return periods. The results in terms of the social and economic impacts are analyzed considering features of age, disability, and the different economic sectors.