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On-campus, intensive and highly specialized courses

Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Assessment

Mangrove Ecotourism area separated by road to the Indian Ocean in Gampong Baro Sayeung, Aceh Jaya, Indonesia

Acquire the expertise to quantitatively evaluate flood and coastal erosion risks within the context of a shifting climate, drawing insights from global case studies. Access crucial insights for contemporary professionals and policymakers engaged in risk management, all while being instructed by world-renowned experts in the field.

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.

Learning objectives

  1. Setup quantification of risk as a computational problem and apply simulation models to estimate hazards in the context of flood and coastal erosion hazards.
  2. Interpret quantified risk information in a context-specific way together with the uncertainties.
  3. Communicate quantified risk information in understandable, but also actionable means.
  4. Calculate risk by combining hazards into suitable risk models.

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:

  1. Pluvial urban floods
  2. Fluvial floods
  3. Flooding in the coastal context (covering both 1&2) in the context of climate change
  4. 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:

  1. Quantitative risk assessment frameworks and approaches.
  2. External and internal determinants of risk (Climate change, local land-use change, system deterioration)
  3. Climate change-driven Flood hazard modelling
  4. Climate change-driven Coastal Erosion hazard modelling
  5. How to convert Hazard estimates to quantitative risk assessments
  6. Interpretation and communication of quantified risk information
  7. 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.

Course Coordinator

Assela Pathirana

Associate Professor in Water Infrastructure Asset Management

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