Special Issue "Impact Assessment and Management of Fluvial Hazards in a Rapidly Changing Environment"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Hazards and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2021.

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Bernhard Gems
E-Mail Website1 Website2
Guest Editor
Unit of Hydraulic Engineering, University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Interests: cascading hazard processes; dam break; flood risk and protection; fluvial process modeling; hydraulic scale models; large wood dynamics; river engineering; sediment transport; torrent science; torrential hazards
Dr. Bruno Mazzorana
E-Mail Website
Assistant Guest Editor
Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra, Universidad Austral de Chile, 5090000 Valdivia, Chile
Interests: cascading hazard processes; flood risk assessment and management; fluvial geomorphology; hydraulic modeling; large wood dynamics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The progressive alteration of climatic conditions together with further human interventions in nature have caused a shift in temporal patterns and intensities of fluvial processes worldwide. The impacted regions and the hazard potential of floods have increased in recent decades, specifically in mountainous regions. Extreme events, going beyond the capacities of protection systems, are expected to occur more frequently in the coming decades. Aiming to cope with this worsened situation, flood risk management actions are currently focused on these substantial challenges. They demand collaborative action among researchers and practitioners, applying a transdisciplinary approach merging technical engineering, ecology, biology, and the social sciences. To make river systems and protection structures “fit for future floods”, they may feature increased capacities without leading to adverse effects in the downstream riparian area. Protection structures for flood and sediment management should prove to be resilient against overload scenarios, and they should be designed based on an even more holistic, multipurpose, and regional planning perspective. These challenges have to be achieved in a highly sensitive environment, without affecting or even restoring the natural river ecosystem and coping with settlement expansion, with returning the required space to river systems in a landscape where the building stock merciless gets closer to the waters, and damage potential is in a continuous substantial rise.

This Special Issue is devoted to all relevant topics in flood risk impact assessment and management coping with these challenges. The following short list covers relevant topics, but any other issues in this context are highly appreciated. A broad spectrum of topics highlights the current importance of flood risk management of this Special Issue:

  • Characteristics of hydrological triggers of design and extreme floods in the river network;
  • Strategies to consider uncertainties and randomness in the statistical/probabilistic concept of design flood definition;
  • Role of hazard zoning in flood risk management;
  • Methods and applied models for the determination of hazard zones;
  • Effects of local, decentralized flood retention in the river network;
  • Innovative multipurpose structures for controlled transfer of discharge and sediment loads;
  • Role of hydropower reservoirs for flood protection, operation strategies based on flood forecasts;
  • Role and relevance of flood forecast systems in flood risk management;
  • Control management of flood retention basins;
  • Consideration of process–building–interaction in flood scenario modeling;
  • Hazard processes on alluvial fans and river deltas;
  • Relevance of large wood in flood risk management;
  • Local structural protection as a complement to traditional flood protection measures;
  • Effective low-cost flood protection strategies for the developing world;
  • Impacts of increasing flood intensities on regional planning and settlement development strategies;
  • Consideration of residual risks in regional planning strategies;
  • Strategies to conserve or restore the good ecological status of waters in the course of flood protection measures.

All covered topics are mainly highlighted from a research perspective but also have a strong link to the practice of flood risk management. The Special Issue aims to publish insights into new innovative concepts, also enabling a comparison of strategies in flood risk management in different regions worldwide.

Dr. Bernhard Gems
Dr. Bruno Mazzorana
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • damage potential
  • design flood
  • exposure
  • extreme flood
  • flood forecast
  • flood protection
  • flood retention
  • flood risk management
  • hazard zone
  • large wood
  • residual risk
  • resilience
  • scenario modeling techniques

Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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