Researchers from the Institute of Geography (IGg) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) developed a new model that analyzes the risk of flooding, with an efficiency of 89 percent to reproduce this type of disaster, reduces costs and allows the creation of scenarios that could face the cities.
Emmanuel Zúñiga Tovar, attached to the IGg’s National Earth Observation Laboratory and who heads this project, explained that the model was applied in 210 cities in Veracruz to verify its efficiency.
“While conventional methods generate overestimated risk information, that is, they assign the same value to all cities within the same municipality, for example, the university obtained differentiated risk values for each one. That is its great difference”, highlighted the IGg scientist.
Traditional risk equation
He explained that the new model incorporates a parameter called proximity into the traditional risk equation (danger due to heavy rains and socioeconomic vulnerability); that is, the proximity of urban areas to bodies of water, in order to establish levels for each area or city independently. The foregoing, he stressed, allows for making adequate decisions and a better future territorial ordering.
Floods, Zúñiga Tovar added, have two types of impact: that associated with the loss of human lives, which “in recent years has been significantly reduced with the Early Warning System for Tropical Cyclones”, and the total loss or partial patrimony of the people, which has gained more importance, together with the affectations to the communication routes.
He pointed out that floods happen practically every year during the rainy season.
“In Mexico, more than 50 percent of the 2,475 municipalities have been affected by this phenomenon at least once in the past 20 years,” he said.
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