Assessment of Flood Vulnerability Through a Multidimensional Index

To overcome the flood challenge, urban planning must consider innovative and simple strategies to achieve resilient and sustainable cities. Vulnerability assessment is considered key to reducing flood risk, and the most widespread methodology for assessing vulnerability is the creation of indexes. However, the indexes are often fragmented or follow a very complicated methodology, making their interpretation difficult for stakeholders, limiting their operational uses for decision-making. This paper addresses these gaps by proposing a methodology through the development of a multidimensional index based on indicators that take into account five dimensions, namely: social, economic, physical, environmental, and institutional dimensions. This method uses easy-to-use interactive maps to assess flooding and multidimensional vulnerability. These maps help decision-makers to understand and effectively address these challenges by allowing them to intuitively visualize risks and assess vulnerability in different areas. This index is comprehensive and rigorous, as well as complementary in its ease of use and application for urban planning decision-makers. The proposed methodology will allow to identify sources of vulnerability to floods and formulate strategies to reduce risk and promote urban resilience, allowing us to face present and future challenges in urban planning. Due to its simplicity of construction and interpretation, the added value of this vulnerability index is to allow comprehensive support for the implementation of adaptation and mitigation strategies in each of the dimensions evaluated.