Assessing the effects of flood resilience technologies on building scale

The impacts of floods on housing are increasing due to more frequent and severe weather events as well as the ongoing development of settlements in flood-prone areas together with the rising vulnerability of assets at risk. Therefore, the improvement of the resilience properties of buildings to better cope with flooding has become a key issue towards more flood resilient cities in European research in recent years. The implementation of flood resilience technologies (FReT) on the individual property scale provides a previously untapped potential to reduce flood damage to buildings due to insufficient transparency of their effects. To overcome this obstacle, the paper presents a four-step extension of a synthetic approach for flood vulnerability analysis to provide evidence on the potential effects of FReT uptake concerning flood damage mitigation. The proposed approach has been integrated in the GIS-based flood damage simulation model HOWAD to support the assessment of FReT alternatives. The simulation of flood damage to buildings in the case study Heywood, Greater Manchester (United Kingdom) revealed the potential of the extended approach to determine the consequences of FReT implementation on building scale.