Spatial exposure aspects contributing to vulnerability and resilience assessments of urban critical infrastructure in a flood and blackout context     

Fekete  Alexander  Tzavella  Katerina  Baumhauer  Roland 《Natural Hazards》2016,86(1):151-176

Blackouts aggravate the situation during an extreme river-flood event by affecting residents and visitors of an urban area. But also rescue services, fire brigades and basic urban infrastructure such as hospitals have to operate under suboptimal conditions. This paper aims to demonstrate how affected people, critical infrastructure, such as electricity, roads and civil protection infrastructure are intertwined during a flood event, and how this can be analysed in a spatially explicit way. The city of Cologne (Germany) is used as a case study since it is river-flood prone and thousands of people had been affected in the floods in 1993 and 1995. Components of vulnerability and resilience assessments are selected with a focus of analysing exposure to floods, and five steps of analysis are demonstrated using a geographic information system. Data derived by airborne and spaceborne earth observation to capture flood extent and demographic data are combined with place-based information about location and distance of objects. The results illustrate that even fire brigade stations, hospitals and refugee shelters are within the flood scenario area. Methodologically, the paper shows how criticality of infrastructure can be analysed and how static vulnerability assessments can be improved by adding routing calculations. Fire brigades can use this information to improve planning on how to access hospitals and shelters under flooded road conditions.

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Mass-cargo-affine industries and climate change     

Anja Scholten  Benno Rothstein  Roland Baumhauer 《Climatic change》2014,122(1-2):111-125

The impact of low water periods on inland navigation and companies is well known by ship-operators and companies that rely on this mode of transport but it is rarely a topic of climate impact research. As climate change might affect the frequency and intensity of low water periods, quantifying the impact of climate change on companies and the effects of possible adaptation measures is vital. In this study, we present a model for quantifying the impact of low water events on companies which rely on inland navigation and apply that model to three anonymous iron and steel companies along the River Rhine. The deviation of optimal storage, the storage level that evens out risk vs. fixed capital, is used in the model to measure the vulnerability of companies. The results show that, depending on the climate scenario, the companies might have to deal with either one or five additional days of empty storage in the near future (2021–2050) and up to nine more days by the 2071–2100 period. Seasonal analysis shows that, consistent with the change in the river discharge, the biggest deviations from optimal storage level occur in the late summer/early autumn. Analysis of adaptation options shows that companies would need to increase storage capacity by 2.5 % for the 2021–2050 period, and by 25 % by the 2071–2100 period. A reduction of ship sizes is not an adaptation option for the three companies in this study, because these companies already use relatively small vessels. This is however an efficient adaptation option for companies which employ larger vessels for transport. Another adaptation option would be to reduce the share of transportation via inland waters, but the feasibility of this option depends on the availability and cost of other modes of transport.  相似文献   

A record of early to middle Holocene environmental change inferred from lake deposits beneath a sabkha sequence in the Central Sahara (Seggedim, NE Niger)   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Jens Brauneck  Florias Mees  Roland Baumhauer 《Journal of Paleolimnology》2013,49(4):605-618

Seggedim is a remote site in NE Niger where previous studies demonstrated the presence of Holocene paleolake deposits beneath an existing sabkha. In 2005, we retrieved a 15-m core that contains a high-resolution record of early to middle Holocene environmental change. Mineralogical, chemical and petrographic data were used to infer paleoenvironmental conditions recorded by successive lake stages. An exceptionally stable lake regime existed from 10.6 to 7.3 cal ka BP. This regime, reflecting moist conditions, was characterized by deposition of continuously laminated diatomite with high organic matter content, formed under meromictic conditions, with very low detrital input. A lake regime shift occurred at 7.3 cal ka BP, interpreted as the beginning of a transition to arid conditions. This shift was initially marked by a change to predominantly clastic sedimentation, followed by increased sand input during later stages, culminating in the onset of the sabkha stage. Because of the presence of reworked organic material in the deposits, reliable radiocarbon dating of the succession of lake stages could not be achieved.  相似文献