Building green infrastructure for mitigating urban flood risk in Beijing, China

Abstract

Due to climate change and accelerated urbanization, urban flooding has an increasing impact on the sustainable development of metropolitan areas. Since the 1990s, green infrastructure has developed as an alternative and sustainable approach to the mitigation of flood disaster in urban areas. To improve the resilience of urban ecological flood control and build a green infrastructure network, we provide quantitative measures of flood risk assessment to generate a grid-scale (1 ×1 km) flood risk assessment results and analyze its spatiotemporal heterogeneity. Then, we propose a GIS-based multi-criteria assessment method to determine the priority areas of green infrastructure according to four criteria, generating a distribution map of green infrastructure priorities in Beijing at the township scale. From the perspective of urban flood risk mitigation, the research proposes a new method to determine the priority areas of green infrastructure, thus establishing suggestions for future green infrastructure construction in Beijing.

Keywords: Green infrastructure layout prioritization, Urban resilience, Spatial analysis, Analytic hierarchy process (AHP)