Climate Change Impacts on Flood-induced Industrial Building Losses in a Coastal City of Australia

Abstract

Buildings in coastal cities of Australia, mostly located in estuarine and deltaic plains, are vulnerable to various types of floods. The adverse effects of flooding could be further exacerbated with global warming and sea level rise. Steel portal framed industrial buildings are widely used as warehouses, supermarkets, manufacturing workshops and storage facilities, which make up a large portion of the building stock in a city. This paper presents a case study to assess building losses for an industrial area exposed to flood hazards and climate change risks in the City of Mackay, Australia. The flood inundation risks for the study area under current and future climates were obtained from data produced by previous flood studies. Various flood types including riverine (fluvial), overland flow (pluvial) and coastal (storm tide) floods were considered for industrial buildings in the study area. A high-fidelity physics-based vulnerability model was developed for a prototype steel portal frame industrial building considering major damage mechanisms for building components under flood-induced hydrostatic and hydrodynamic loads. Industrial building losses were evaluated based on the vulnerability model and the predicted extreme flood inundation at individual building levels for different average recurrent intervals considering the climate change impacts. The results suggest that the climate change impacts on aggregated building losses for 100-year floods are marginal. For 500-year floods in future climate (year 2100), the aggregated building losses could potentially increase by about 47% for riverine flood and about 176% for coastal flood, whereas the climate change impacts on building losses due to overland flow flood are negligible.