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Floods often cause damage to homes and businesses if these buildings are in the natural flood plains of rivers. People could avoid riverine flood damage by moving away from rivers. However, people in many countries have traditionally lived and worked by rivers because the land is usually flat and fertile. Also, the rivers provide easy travel ...
Flood management is a broad term that includes measures to control or mitigate flood waters, such as actions to prevent floods from occurring or to minimize their impacts when they do occur. [4] [5] Flood management methods can be structural or non-structural:
Flood stage is the water level, as read by a stream gauge or tide gauge, for a body of water at a particular location, measured from the level at which a body of water threatens lives, property, commerce, or travel. [1] The term "at flood stage" is commonly used to describe the point at which this occurs.
Climate change is already making extreme flooding more frequent and intense and by 2050 100-year flood events are projected to occur at least twice as frequently as today across 40% of the planet.
From the ecological perspective, the most distinctive aspect of floodplains is the flood pulse associated with annual floods, and so the floodplain ecosystem is defined as the part of the river valley that is regularly flooded and dried. [19] Floods bring in detrital material rich in nutrients and release nutrients from dry soil as it is flooded.
These "climate hazards" are floods, heat waves, wildfires, tropical cyclones, and the like. [13] Some things can make natural disasters worse. Examples are inadequate building norms, marginalization of people and poor choices on land use planning. [3] Many developing countries do not have proper disaster risk reduction systems. [14]
Drinking water treatment plants are also at risk. Most U.S. cities and towns get drinking water from rivers and lakes, and water treatment plants tend to be near the water bodies from which they draw.
In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and subsequently recovering. Such perturbations and disturbances can include stochastic events such as fires, flooding, windstorms, insect population explosions, and human activities such as deforestation, fracking of the ground for oil extraction, pesticide sprayed in soil ...