Flood Risk of Municipalities in Upper Basins of Slovakia

Abstract

The aim is to present a comprehensive, integrated flood risk assessment for municipalities located in the upper basins. An integrated approach perceives the flood risk as the combination of flood hazard and vulnerability. The flood hazard is expressed as the potential of the basin to flood due to basin attributes. The vulnerability is understood as inherent characteristics of municipalities that create the potential of municipalities for the susceptibility of houses to damage and of people to suffer physical and mental harm and the ability of people to cope with negative consequences of floods. A spatial multicriteria decision analysis was applied to express the flood risk relatively by an ordinal scale. Municipalities were classified into the five classes of flood risk by an aggregation of sub-indices reflecting flood hazard and vulnerability. An integrated approach addresses the assessment and management of the flood risk in a more complex way and eliminates the negative effects of more traditional engineering approaches.