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Ice-jam floods pose a serious threat to many riverside communities in cold regions. Ice-jam-related flooding can cause loss of human life, millions of dollars in property damage, and adverse impacts on ecology. An effective flood management strategy is necessary to reduce the overall risk in flood-prone areas. Most of these strategies require a detailed risk-based management study to assess their effectiveness in reducing flood risk. Zoning regulation is a sustainable measure to reduce overall flood risk for a flood-prone area. Zoning regulation is a specified area in a floodplain where certain restrictions apply to different land uses (e.g., development or business). A stochastic framework was introduced to evaluate the effectiveness of a potential zoning regulation. A stochastic framework encompasses the impacts of all the possible expected floods instead of a more traditional approach where a single design flood is incorporated. The downtown area of Fort McMurray along the Athabasca River was selected to explore the impact of zoning regulation on reducing expected annual damages (EAD) from ice-jam flooding. The results show that a hypothetical zoning regulation for a certain area in the town of Fort McMurray (TFM) can be effective in substantially reducing the level of EAD. A global sensitivity analysis was also applied to understand the impacts of model inputs on ice-jam flood risk using a regional sensitivity method. The results show that model boundary conditions such as river discharge, the inflowing volume of ice and ice-jam toe locations are highly sensitive to ice-jam flood risk. Full article

The subject of this article is the presentation of site conditions and the authors’ concept of the development of the degraded riverside area located in the city of Cracow-Kraków Zabłocie. The concept transforms the above-named area into a multifunctional complex including museum, coworking, business and hotel functions. The area subject to development borders three important districts of Cracow: Old Town (Stare Miasto), Grzegórzki and Podgórze on the bank of the Vistula (Wisła) river. In the land development and urban planning documents of the city of Cracow this area has been marked as the public space which is to become a local focal point or a local centre. The main objective of this work was to find answers to the posed research questions concerning the historic context, formal and legal state, significance for the community as well as economic and ecological implications of the area to be developed. The main purpose was to properly develop the degraded riverside embankment in the downtown environment. The research method was based on own mixed method which encompassed the studies of historical literature and the legal–formal status as well as in situ examinations, including the analyses of the condition of the built and natural environment, traffic and circulation as well as photographic documentation. The authors also familiarised themselves with the activities undertaken by the local community with a view to the area’s regeneration. On the grounds of initial investigations, the SWOT analysis was performed and the evaluation of groups of prospective users was conducted. Comparative studies were conducted including selected examples of European riverside development projects. In its assumptions, the proposed concept of the riverside development in Kraków-Zabłocie is to meet the needs of the local community, enable further development of tourism, which is very important to Cracow, and satisfy the paradigm of sustainable development. The effect is a multi-functional complex that becomes an inherent part of the existing context. Full article