Urban Flood Model for Bangalore City

About:

A three-day International Workshop on “Urban Floods” was organized jointly by the Interdisciplinary Center for Water Research (ICWaR) and the Divecha centre for Climate Change (DCCC), during 27 – 29 June 2018, at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The primary purpose of the workshop was to bring together the international experience in dealing with the increasing frequencies of urban floods across the world. The workshop consisted of plenary talks by colleagues from different organisations of India and worldwide including Paris, Canada, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nepal. In addition, several discussion sessions, including open discussion and panel discussion, were conducted during the three days to discuss about the various aspects of urban flooding.

The participants were divided into four groups to discuss about aspects of urban flood management such as the technology driven solutions, non-structural measures, policy interventions, and societal responses. Group 1 discussed about preparedness, response, recovery and auxiliary attributes where the politicians, industrialists, stakeholders, researchers and academicians need to collaborate to work on pre and post-controlling of urban floods. Group 2 concluded that the regulating land use and micro-catchment management may play a vital role in reduction of flood impacts. Moreover, maintaining a database of flood footprints will help in further research studies. Regarding policy intervention, Group 3 suggested forming a national repository of data and flood models, which can be accessed by practitioners, decision makers and researchers. It was also suggested to prepare a disaster management plan for the city and set a legal framework for its implementation. Group 4 discussed about the importance of society during post flood response and emphasized on local capacity building and awareness programs to be included in urban flood mitigation strategies.

A panel discussion was conducted which was led by Prof. Solbodan Simonovic to discuss urban flood from different perspective i.e., Academic, Feild, Political/ decision maker and Knowledge and Social Perspective. The summary of the panel discussion as follows

1) Field/ Practitioner Perspective:

• Data scarcity has significant influence on decisions making in field.

• The encroachment in storm water drains results in reduced water carrying capacities.

• The solid waste disposal is one of the major causes of urban floods so a policy must be developed based on incentive, penalty approaches.

• The response mechanism must be focused more on vulnerable groups and the flood information must be disseminated to these groups on a priority.

2) Politician/ Decision-Maker Perspective:

• The researchers and practitioners must be adequately prepared with “Evidence based” plans to convince the politician and demonstrate the necessity of the immediate action.

• The practitioners and researchers must also provide alternative options/plans for better flexibility to decision making.

3) Knowledge and Social Perspective:

• There is improper knowledge downscaling i.e. disconnect of knowledge transfer between decision makers and end users.

• Knowledge sharing and learning from existing case studies may help in preparing better mitigation and response strategies.

• Open access of scientific knowledge to end users may facilitate knowledge transfer.

4) Academic Perspective:

• The academic institutions should launch new and dedicated courses which are pertaining to recent research challenges.

• The academic institutions should conduct various awareness programs on societal responses of pre flood, during flood and post flood.

• There should be sufficient funding available for institutes to produce high quality research.

• There should be an effective consortium consisting of academicians, industrialists and public sector to address various research challenges.

Prof. Mujumdar concluded the workshop by emphasizing the importance of understanding the problem of urban flooding from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Lastly, he thanked all the participants and resource persons for their valuable contribution to the workshop.