Integrating risk assessment into spatial planning: RiskOTe decision support system

Abstract

The way in which risk maps are used in decision support processes for spatial planning at local scale is critical to helping decision makers in the definition of a prevention strategy to minimize risks. This paper presents a spatial decision support system that is developed to assist spatial planning by integrating the risk management component at municipal level. For the development of the RiskOTe tool, a semi-quantitative risk assessment model was used that assumes risk management to be comprehensive with respect to the type of hazard, vulnerability and risk minimization measures. In this paper, the components for the development of the spatial decision support system are identified, described and implemented using the municipality of Oeiras, in Portugal, as case study. The use of the system allowed the generation of multiple scenarios and outcomes. The results demonstrate that decision-making on the transformation of land uses by integrating risk analysis can be supported on a solid basis of information obtained from a spatial decision support system.