Urbanization and floods in the Seoul Metropolitan area of South Korea: What old maps tell us

Abstract This study examined how land cover change, topographic, and socioeconomic factors affect flood damage in the Seoul metropolitan area of South Korea that has experienced rapid economic growth and urbanization for the last 30 years. We used geographic information system and spatial regression analysis for identifying explanatory factors for each ten years from 1985 to 2014. A unique aspect of this study is how land use history could explain the spatial variation of flood damage using an old map created in the early 20th century. Our results show that high flood damage areas are spatially clustered in the outskirts of the study area where rapid urbanization happened. Population density was the common factor that best explained flood damage in all three periods. The percentage of farmland and the percentage of urban area were positively and negatively associated with flood damage in 1990 and 2000, respectively. Fiscal self-reliance ratio and previous flood damage were negatively and positively related to flood damage in 2010, respectively. In the early stage of urban expansion, the conversion of agricultural land to urban land was associated with increasing flood damage. As urbanization continued and matured, the conversion of forest areas to urban areas better explained the spatial variation of flood damage. This study demonstrates the importance of historical land use for understanding urban floods and shows that factors affecting flood damage have changed over time, suggesting the need for different flood management strategies to minimize flood damage as urbanization progresses.

[1]  H. Choi,et al.  A New Flood Index for Use in Evaluation of Local Flood Severity: A Case Study of Small Ungauged Catchments in Korea 1 , 2013 .

[2]  Young-Oh Kim,et al.  Flood risk assessment using regional regression analysis , 2012, Natural Hazards.

[3]  Heejun Chang,et al.  Spatial variations of summer precipitation trends in South Korea, 1973–2005 , 2007 .

[4]  C. Field.  Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaption , 2012 .

[5]  D. K. Yoon,et al.  Examining Vulnerability Factors to Natural Disasters with a Spatial Autoregressive Model: The Case of South Korea , 2018 .

[6]  S. Cutter,et al.  Temporal and spatial changes in social vulnerability to natural hazards , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[7]  Youngkeun Song,et al.  Spatiotemporal Analysis of the Formation of Informal Settlements in a Metropolitan Fringe: Seoul (1950–2015) , 2017 .

[8]  Alain Dervieux,et al.  A case study of land cover change (1950–2003) and runoff in a Mediterranean catchment , 2012 .

[9]  Peijun Shi,et al.  The effect of land use/cover change on surface runoff in Shenzhen region, China , 2007 .

[10]  B. V. Mudgal,et al.  Impact of urbanization on flooding: The Thirusoolam sub watershed – A case study , 2012 .

[11]  Satoru Okubo,et al.  Urbanization linked with past agricultural landuse patterns in the urban fringe of a deltaic Asian mega-city: a case study in Bangkok , 2005 .

[12]  Chun G. Yoon,et al.  Wise use of paddy rice fields to partially compensate for the loss of natural wetlands , 2009, Paddy and Water Environment.

[13]  Daniel G. Aliaga,et al.  Influence of urban pattern on inundation flow in floodplains of lowland rivers. , 2018, The Science of the total environment.

[14]  Marcelo Gomes Miguez,et al.  A catchment scale Integrated Flood Resilience Index to support decision making in urban flood control design , 2017 .

[15]  Hao Zhang,et al.  Rapid Urbanization and Implications for Flood Risk Management in Hinterland of the Pearl River Delta, China: The Foshan Study , 2008, Sensors.

[16]  Heejun Chang,et al.  Recent research approaches to urban flood vulnerability, 2006–2016 , 2017, Natural Hazards.

[17]  Heejun Chang,et al.  What is responsible for increasing flood risks? The case of Gangwon Province, Korea , 2009 .

[18]  G. Wadhams,et al.  Making sense of it all: bacterial chemotaxis , 2004, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology.

[19]  M. Jaboyedoff,et al.  Opportunities, incentives and challenges to risk sensitive land use planning: Lessons from Nepal, Spain and Vietnam , 2015 .

[20]  Eric Tate,et al.  Social vulnerability to floods: Review of case studies and implications for measurement , 2015 .

[21]  Ji-xi Gao,et al.  An assessment of flood hazard vulnerability in the Dongting Lake Region of China , 2007 .

[22]  Anthony Gar-On Yeh,et al.  The Transformation of the Urban Planning System in China from a Centrally-Planned to Transitional Economy , 1999 .

[23]  Tao Gao,et al.  Extreme precipitation event over the Yellow Sea western coast: Is there a trend? , 2017 .

[24]  J. Baker,et al.  Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and the Urban Poor , 2012 .

[25]  Nicolas G. Wright,et al.  A flood vulnerability index for coastal cities and its use in assessing climate change impacts , 2012, Natural Hazards.

[26]  Daniel G. Aliaga,et al.  Procedural generation of flood-sensitive urban layouts , 2018, Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science.

[27]  Heejun Chang,et al.  Dreams and Migration in South Korea’s Border Region: Landscape Change and Environmental Impacts , 2019, Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era.

[28]  P. Moran.  Notes on continuous stochastic phenomena. , 1950, Biometrika.

[29]  I. Douglas.  Flooding in African cities, scales of causes, teleconnections, risks, vulnerability and impacts , 2017 .

[30]  Qihao Weng.  A remote sensing?GIS evaluation of urban expansion and its impact on surface temperature in the Zhujiang Delta, China , 2001 .

[31]  Nicolas G. Wright,et al.  Reducing the complexity of the flood vulnerability index , 2010 .

[32]  S. Brody,et al.  Examining the impact of land use on flood losses in Seoul, Korea , 2018 .

[33]  S. M. de Jong,et al.  River flood damage assessment using Ikonos imagery , 2001 .

[34]  I. Jung,et al.  The temporal and spatial structures of recent and future trends in extreme indices over Korea from a regional climate projection , 2011 .

[35]  Timothy W. Collins,et al.  Marginalization, Facilitation, and the Production of Unequal Risk: The 2006 Paso del Norte Floods , 2010 .

[36]  J. K. Routray,et al.  Multidimensional Model for Vulnerability Assessment of Urban Flooding: An Empirical Study in Pakistan , 2018, International Journal of Disaster Risk Science.

[37]  N. Lam,et al.  Changes in Exposure to Flood Hazards in the United States , 2017 .

[38]  Idowu Ajibade,et al.  Urban flooding in Lagos, Nigeria: Patterns of vulnerability and resilience among women , 2013 .

[39]  C. Welty,et al.  Pluvial flood risk and opportunities for resilience , 2018, WIREs Water.

[40]  Guido Nigrelli,et al.  Application of a model to the evaluation of flood damage , 2009, GeoInformatica.

[41]  J. Teller,et al.  Effects of spatial planning on future flood risks in urban environments. , 2018, Journal of environmental management.

[42]  Mahendra Singh Nathawat,et al.  Waterlogging and flood hazards vulnerability and risk assessment in Indo Gangetic plain , 2010 .

[43]  Laura Turconi,et al.  Uncorrected land-use planning highlighted by flooding: the Alba case study (Piedmont, Italy) , 2012 .

[44]  B. Braun,et al.  Floods in megacity environments: vulnerability and coping strategies of slum dwellers in Dhaka/Bangladesh , 2011 .