Environmental Risks Caused by Floods in Built-Up Areas

Abstract

The article considers the possible consequences of flooding for the ecological state of territories, sets the tasks of risk assessment and prevention of damage from dangerous hydrological processes. The authors discuss possible ecological consequences caused by flooding for ecosystems and built-up areas and suggest methods for risk assessment and risk management in flooded areas. Natural and anthropogenic factors of floods and issues of predictability of hazardous hydrological processes are also considered. The article shows that the risk of a disaster, the initiating factor of which is a flood, occurs when hydro-meteorological, geological and other hazards interact with vulnerability factors of a physical, social, economic and environmental nature. It is proposed to take an extreme hydrological event of low probability as a scenario of a catastrophic event, for example, the historical extreme of the maximum water flow. As an example, we consider the decisions taken to prevent flooding in built-up areas on the example of the Kuban river basin of the Krasnodar territory.