ABSTRACT
Floods are one of the most frequent and devastating natural disasters, causing important social and economic losses around the globe. To ensure their proper management, it is essential to have risk assessment methodologies to address the hazard and vulnerability aspects associated with the occurrence of these events integrally. Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to provide a generic framework to assess flood risk through the incorporation of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods into geographic information systems (GIS). The proposed approach considers a series of morphologic, hydrogeological, meteorological, and socio-environmental factors characterized from open data available at a worldwide scale, which are weighted using participatory methods to engage stakeholders in the prioritization of both flood hazard-prone areas and vulnerability variables.
