Promoting safety societies with a non-stationary multidimensional model that prioritizes flood risks under climate change effects

Managing floods is already a challenging task, but climate change combined with the unprecedented growth of cities aggravates their multiple adverse consequences. Current papers outlined trends in the intensity and frequency of some climate and weather extremes over periods, including rainfall patterns. Thus, interrelations among the society, economic sector, critical infrastructure, and sustainability lead policymakers, public managers, and professionals of different fields to tackle a variety of aspects in order to adopt strategic policies for enhancing life quality in urban societies and then preventing future losses. In this field, Multi-Criteria Decision Making-Aiding is suitable because it takes into account the DM’s preference structure to assess future risks. Given this backdrop, this work introduces a novel multicriteria decision model for enhancing future risks under climate change and socioeconomic forecasting. Our model differs from the current approaches in the literature because it deals with non-stationary probabilities to model the hazard scenarios and their implications to estimate flood damages and prevent its losses. An in-depth discussion regarding the state-of-the-art in climate and urban modeling, this work provides a step-by-step procedure that assesses social, human, sanitary, and economic risks with the Multi-Attribute Utility Theory and Decision Analysis. A numerical application in an urban area in the Northeast of Brazil is conducted with views to accredit the novel approach in which the time dependency is highlighted. Our results map and evaluate flood risks for 2021 – 2060, exploring then insights for designing long-term adaptation policies that confront the damaging effects of this natural hazard. Keywords: urban flood risk, multicriteria decision-making, climate change, emerging risks.