Assessing the Effectiveness of Mitigation Strategies for Flood Risk Reduction in the Segamat River Basin, Malaysia

Abstract

Flooding is a frequent, naturally recurring phenomenon worldwide that can become disastrous if not addressed accordingly. This paper aims to evaluate the impacts of land use change and climate change on flooding in the Segamat River Basin, Johor, Malaysia, with 1D–2D hydrodynamic river modeling, using InfoWorks Integrated Catchment Modeling (ICM). The study involved the development of flood maps for four different scenarios: (1) future land use in 2030; (2) the impacts of climate change; (3) three mitigation strategies comprising detention ponds, rainwater harvesting systems (RWHSs), and permeable pavers; and (4) a combination of these three mitigation strategies. The obtained results show increases in the flood peaks under both the land use change and climate change scenarios. With the anticipated increase in development activities within the vicinity up to 2030, the overall impact of urbanization on the extent of flooding would be rather moderate, as the upper and middle parts of the basin would still be dominated by forests and agricultural activities (approximately 81.13%). In contrast, the potential flood-inundated area is expected to increase from 12.25% to 16.64% under storms of 10-, 50-, 100-, and 1000-year average recurrence intervals (ARI). Interestingly, the simulation results suggest that only the detention pond mitigation strategy has a considerable impact on reducing floods, while the other two mitigation strategies have less flood reduction advantages for this agricultural-based rural basin located in a tropical region.