Flood Risk Management (Online Course)

LD ARCH 119 and 229 is an online course offered Spring semesters, and is open to enrollment to students across the UC system via UC Online.  Lectures are Mondays and Wednesdays 9:00-10:30, with 1-hour discussion sections on Tuesday mornings.  The course is offered as an undergraduate class, LD ARCH 119, and as a graduate class LD ARCH 229.

The Challenge

Floods are the most expensive and one of the deadliest natural hazards in the US. As physical infrastructure ages and floods become more severe with climate change, our ability to manage and respond to floods is increasingly strained. Despite massive investments in structural measures to ‘control’ floods, losses from floods continue to increase, mostly because exposure has increased with expanded urban development on flood-prone lands, exacerbated by climate change intensifying the magnitude and frequency of extreme events.  California includes urban areas with among the highest flood risk in the US. While conceptualized conventionally as a static condition, in reality flood risk is dynamic and evolving – both in response to changes in hazard (physical processes producing floods and the performance of flood ‘control’ infrastructure), changes in exposure and vulnerability (development on flood-prone lands). Examples of the former are the increasing extent and severity of wildfires, because intense rains on burned areas produce higher runoff, sediment loads, and destructive debris flows, such as experienced in Santa Barbara in 2018.  Examples of the latter are new urban developments on flood-prone land, which still occur despite policies intended to discourage developments in such hazardous areas.

Conventional approaches to flood risk management have relied heavily on hard engineering structures (levees, dams, and engineered channels).  However, these structural measures can only reduce the hazard, not the exposure or vulnerability of the population, which often increases in response to the perception that floods are less likely. 

Course Description

This course explains fundamental concepts in flood risk management, summarizes the history and governance of flood management in California, the US, and globally, and tracks the development of state-of-the art approaches to assessing flood risk, equity implications, and utilizing nature-based solutions to sustainably manage floods.  The course covers not only on flood modeling and engineering, but also integrates cross-cutting themes such as equity, demographic trends, floodplain geomorphology, ecology, climate change, law, and governance.

The course draws upon faculty across the UC system, as well as the agency and practitioner community.  Collectively, the instructors have broad experience working directly with federal, state and local agencies on flood risk management issues, so the course content is well grounded in the realities of building, monitoring, and maintaining flood defense levees, emergency response to flooding, and efforts to limit land use on flood-prone lands.