Floods in the Urban Environment and Social Vulnerability: a study case in Curitiba, Brazil

Abstract

This paper deals with the spatial relationship of social vulnerability and the flooding areas in the central portion of the Belem River Basin, in Curitiba / Brazil, as the research problem being the possible aggregation of aspects of environmental vulnerability to flooding in urban areas under social conditions previously existing. The objective of this article was to identify regions of overlapping social vulnerability to the flooding areas, obtained from the creation of scenarios of this type of event simulated in a GIS environment, in the panorama of social vulnerability identified by the Atlas of Social Vulnerability of Brazilian Municipalities (IPEA, 2015). The flood scenarios were created through computational modeling using the Hazus software, adapted to the Brazilian conditions. Then it was possible to identify possible areas and population affected by the simulated water mass. With the results obtained, it is possible to estimate the affected population, to classify the degree of vulnerability due to floods and to associate it with social vulnerability, and thus to obtain an index of social and environmental vulnerability due to the events of urban floods.