Strengthening flood management education
Professor Erik Pasche, from the University of Hamburg, focused its first lecture at UNESCO-IHE on software development for flood risk management. Professor Pasche will be lecturing as visiting Professor for the institute in the coming years. This collaboration with the University of Hamburg will be extended to the area of research in flood resilience and urban flood management.
In recent years, Europe has felt the effects of increased river flooding. In order to adapt to increasing risks, cities have to adapt housing and business to climate change. Flood defense is not the right approach, points Professor Pasche: “risk management understood as the application of knowledge to prevent, adapt and learn to live with floods is the right line to follow.
Risk management should start with a flood risk map developed on the basis of fluvial flows, vulnerability & exposure indexes and consequences’ assessments. Of course, this requires the development of mathematical models. Nevertheless, Professor Pasche emphasized that “engineers need to see the limits of models. There is reality and there are models, which are only a simplification of reality”. “Once we understand that, we are ready to use interface models adaptable to reality”. Integration of models, “building a pyramid instead of bungalows”, is the way forward.
Based on these premises, the hydrology team of the University of Hamburg developed an open source application for geospatial modelling and simulation. Kalypso is developed to be a user friendly tool for GIS-based modelling and simulation of hydrological and hydraulic numerical models. Thanks to a generic approach one can use the platform to handle models of arbitrary nature.
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Date published: 02 October 2008