COFRU

Collaborative Research on Flood Resilience in Urban areas (CORFU) is a major project involving 15 European and Asian institutions, funded by a grant from the European Commission, Seventh Framework Programme. Professor Slobodan Djordjevic of the University of Exeter is Project Coordinator.

The overall aim of CORFU is to enable European and Asian partners to learn from each other through joint investigation, development, implementation and dissemination of short to medium term strategies that will enable more scientifically sound management of the consequences of urban flooding in the future.

Flood impacts in urban areas – potential deaths, damage to infrastructure and health problems in the first place and consequent effects on individuals and on communities – and possible responses will be assessed by envisaging different scenarios of relevant drivers: urban development, socio-economic trends and climate changes. The cost-effectiveness of resilience measures and integrative and adaptable flood management plans for these scenarios will be quantified.

The CORFU project will look at advanced and novel strategies and provide adequate measures for improved flood management in cities. The differences in urban flooding problems in Asia and in Europe range from levels of economic development, infrastructure age, social systems and decision making processes, to prevailing drainage methods, seasonality of rainfall patterns and climate change trends.

Our vision is for CORFU to use these differences to create synergies that will bring new quality to flood management strategies globally. Through a 4-year collaborative research programme, the latest technological advances will be cross-fertilized with traditional and emerging approaches to living with floods.

Key novel modelling technologies developed within CORFU include: (i) a Bayesian probabilistic optimisation algorithm for urban growth modelling based on the use historic land cover maps taken from satellite data combined with thematic maps, (ii) a multi-cell approach to urban flood modelling in mega cities that adopts a coarse grid for the global model domain of the whole city and refined grids that are activated only when flooding occurs, (iii) the first health impact model that uses a combination of deterministic hydraulic modelling of transport and mixing of pollutants in flood water to predict their concentrations and the data on human vulnerability through dose-response functions and (iv) a new Flood Resilience Index (FRI), which takes into account different spatial scales from parcel to city scale, by evaluating external and internal requirements for urban functions