From flood risk mapping toward reducing vulnerability: the case of Addis Ababa

Flood risk maps for the built environment can be obtained by integrating geo-spatial information on hazard, vulnerability and exposure. They provide precious support for strategic urban planning and decision-making. These maps, generated in a probabilistic framework, can consider various sources of uncertainty in the food risk assessment such as the occurrence of extreme fooding events, future land use and land cover, characteristics of the buildings, and exposure to fooding. This paper investigates how these maps can be used in complicated urban context such as developing countries, where engineers are forced to work with scarce or little data. Specifcally, a detailed investigation on the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has been conducted. Although the city of Addis Ababa is undergoing extensive formal housing development, it is most likely that the informal settlements will continue to constitute a signifcant portion of urban housing landscape in the years to come. Recent research fndings and feld work from a large project (FP7-CLUVA) are employed in order to provide a quantifed basis for decision-making between alternative adaptation strategies for informal buildings in Addis Ababa. Risk maps, obtained by upscaling more accurate risk assessment results at neighborhood level, are adopted for risk zoning of the urban residential texture within the city. This provides risk-based criteria for both identifying suitable food adaptation strategies and prioritizing between viable risk mitigation measures