Flood Risk Management In Small Urban River Using A Sustainable Urban Drainage System: Wortley Beck, Leeds, Uk

In the UK, urban river basins are particularly vulnerable to flash floods due to short and intense rainfall. This paper presents potential flood resilience approaches for the highly urbanised Wortley Beck river basin, south west of the Leeds city centre. The reach of Wortley Beck is approximately 6km long with contributing catchment area of 30km2 that drain into the River Aire. Lower Wortley has experienced regular flooding over the last few years from a range of sources, including Wortley Beck and surface and ground water, that affects properties both upstream and downstream of Farnley Lake as well as Wortley Ring Road. This has serious implications for society, the environment and economy activity in the City of Leeds. The first stage of the study involves systematically incorporating Wortley Beck’s land scape features on an Arc-GIS platform to identify existing green features in the region. This process also enables the exploration of potential blue green features: green spaces, green roofs, water retention ponds and swales at appropriate locations and connect them with existing green corridors to maximize their productivity. The next stage is involved in developing a detailed 2D urban flood inundation model for the Wortley Beck region using the CityCat model. CityCat is capable to model the effects of permeable/impermeable ground surfaces and buildings/roofs to generate flood depth and velocity maps at 1m caused by design storm events. The final stage of the study is involved in simulation of range of rainfall and flood event scenarios through CityCat model with different blue green features. Installation of other hard engineering individual property protection measures through water butts and flood walls are also incorporated in the CityCat model. This enables an integrated sustainable flood resilience strategy for this region.

Does The Risk Of Groundwater Depletion Drive Tube-Well Technology Adoption: A Case Of Pakistan

We employ a moment-based approach to empirically analyse farmer’s decisions about adoption of tube-well technology under depleting groundwater resources using a farm level data from 200 farming households in the Punjab province, Pakistan. The results indicate that the higher the expected profit the greater the probability of adoption. Similarly, with increasing variance the probability of adopting tube-well increases significantly indicating that farmers choose to adopt tube-well technology in order to hedge against production risks. Statistical non-significant the third moment i.e., skewness indicates that farmer generally do not consider downside yield risk when decide to adopt tube-well technology whereas highly significant fourth moment (kurtosis) employ that probability of adoption decreases as a result of extreme events in profit distribution. In addition, we show that land tenureship and three other exogenous variables, i.e., extension services, access to different sources of information and off-farm income play a significant role in the adoption process.