Flood Risk Assessment of Urban Critical Infrastructures Using Crowd‐Sourced and Open Data on Hazard, Exposure and Vulnerability

ABSTRACT Worldwide, cities rely on the proper functioning of critical infrastructures (CIs) such as electricity, telecommunication, water supply and transportation. Failure of those infrastructures can lead to significant and long‐lasting impacts, even far beyond the flooded areas due to cascading effects. Local authorities are eager to take action to reduce flood risk and strive to increase the resilience of their communities. However, CI are often not considered in flood risk assessments. One of the reasons is that CI operators do not share their CI data and internal risk assessments. Therefore, an integral view on flood risk is lacking and risks may be unidentified or underestimated. To overcome this limitation, in this paper we propose an integrated framework for flood risk assessment of urban critical infrastructures (UCIs) for local authorities, which is based on publicly available and field‐surveyed CI data. The proposed framework supports cities to carry out cross‐sectoral risk screenings on urban district level to evaluate the need for in‐depth risk assessments and risk dialogues with CI operators.