Nancy Janeth Guarderas Hurtado will give a lecture about her masters thesis in Environment and Natural Resources. The thesis is titled: Multicriteria risk evaluation of coastal flooding in the greater Reykjavik area, Iceland.
Abstract
The effects of floods in coastal urban areas can be considerable, given the concentration of population, economic activities, and infrastructure. Floods can be caused by extreme weather events including storm floods. This flood risk is enhanced by sea level rise and land subsidence. In Iceland, the vast majority of the population and economic assets are concentrated in urban areas along the coastline, in particular within the municipalities in the Greater Reykjavik Area. This thesis presents the result of a multicriteria flood risk assessment on the municipalities of Reykjavík and Seltjarnarnes. The methodology maps the risk within three aspects, economic, social and environmental risk. A total of 14 elements at risk were selected to characterize these aspects, including the distribution of buildings and economic assets, population, cultural value, and environmentally sensitive areas. These criteria are combined through an additive weighting procedure in order to obtain multicriteria risk maps. The resulting maps show that the main areas at risk are the downtown Reykjavík area, the lower areas of the Seltjarnarnes peninsula, and the land filled areas. The maps show the increase of flood risk due to sea level rise and land subsidence.
Main supervisor Þröstur Þorsteinsson, Associate Professor in Environment and Natural Resources and Institute of Earth Sciences, and co-supervisor Hans Jörgen Henriksen, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS).
Examiner: Hrönn Hrafnsdóttir