Large-scale flood risk assessment in data scarce areas: an application to Central Asia

Abstract. The countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia are highly prone to natural hazards, more specifically, floods, earthquakes, and landslides. The European Union, in collaboration with the World Bank and the GFDRR, created the program “Strengthening Financial Resilience and Accelerating Risk Reduction in Central Asia” (SFRARR), aiming to advance disaster and climate resilience in Central Asia. Within the framework of the SFRARR project, the “Regionally consistent risk assessment for earthquakes and floods and selective landslide scenario analysis for strengthening financial resilience and accelerating risk reduction in Central Asia” was conceived to help handle and achieve the parent project objectives.

A fully probabilistic risk assessment for pluvial and fluvial floods has been carried out for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan for supporting regional and national risk financing and insurance applications, including potential indemnity and/or parametric risk financing solutions for the structuring of a regional program. The pluvial flood part of the study, however, is omitted here for brevity. A homogenized risk assessment methodology for the five countries and across multiple hazards (floods and earthquake) and asset types has been adopted to obtain strategic financial solutions consistent across geographical areas and across economic sectors.

This article presents the data, model, methodology and results for the five Central Asia countries of the flood risk assessment, which represents the first high-resolution regional-scale transboundary risk assessment study in the area aiming at providing tools for decision-making. The output information will inform and enable the World Bank to initiate a policy dialogue.

Currently, the availability of risk information for Disaster Risk Management (DRM) and Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance (DRFI) activities remains variable across the region and has been provided by previous projects focusing on a single country. Moreover, few of these studies have quantified multi-hazard disaster risk, and, to our best knowledge, none have done so for the whole region using probabilistic methods applied with the sufficient fidelity required to robustly inform the development of DRFI solutions.