Mapping Flood Vulnerabilities of the East Riding of Yorkshire

Flooding has caused intensive damage to communities both economically and socially in recent decades. Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM) aims at reducing the diverse impacts of disasters, while vulnerability has been recognised as its most beneficial phase. This study contributes to the assessment of vulnerability at a subregional scale through the development of appropriate sets of indicators and methods. A modified version of the BBC (Bogardi, Birkmann, and Cardona) model was selected as the conceptual framework of the vulnerability assessment. This model depicts characteristics and components of vulnerability and defines four pillars of sustainable development as the sub-components of vulnerability. Notwithstanding some shortages in the model, it has been a great vehicle for vulnerability assessment and has been successful in operationalising the research objectives. Three sectors of land use were extracted in order to cover the context-relevant characteristics of vulnerability. Indicators were developed in order to measure and map flood vulnerability: 15 indicators for the arable sector, 15 for the wildlife sector, and 34 for the urban sector. The development of indicators involved steps including a review of previous works, the building of vulnerability components and sub-components, the identification of indicators, and data collection. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) provided the basis for all analytical and methodological processes of the work. A 1 km grid cell raster map was set as the format of the final mapping. In order to map the final vulnerability for the East Riding of Yorkshire, indicators needed to be transferred, normalised, weighted and integrated. Since this approach is greatly reliant on the decisions made at different analytical and methodological steps, an evaluation of the outcomes seems necessary. A sensitivity analysis was applied to this study to examine the sensitivity of the model to changes in methods and data.