Date: 23-01-2026
PhD dissertation "Multidimensional spatial index of long-term vulnerability to urban flooding: methodological design, application in Girona, and development of a virtual city simulator" by Ana Noemí Gomez
Abstract:
Publications:
- Gomez Vaca, A.N.; Popartan, L.A.; Selvas, G.A.; Nuss-Girona, S.; Abily, M.; Rodríguez-Roda, I. Virtual City Simulator: A Scenario-Based Tool for Multidimensional Urban Flood Long-Term Vulnerability Assessment and Planning in Mediterranean Cities. Water 2025, 17, 3538. https://doi.org/10.3390/w17243538
- Gomez Vaca, A.N., Popartan, L.A., Nuss-Girona, S. et al. Spatial approach for assessing vulnerability to urban flooding: a proposal for a multidimensional index. Nat Hazards 121, 16799–16825 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-025-07451-5
Floods are among the most frequent and costly natural disasters, and their urban impact will continue to increase due to accelerated urbanization, land-use change, climate variability, and aging infrastructures. In this context, risk management can no longer focus solely on measuring the hazard or responding during emergencies: it is necessary to incorporate long-term vulnerability, understood as the combination of exposure, susceptibility, and adaptive capacity. This perspective aligns with the Sendai Framework and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which call for more systemic urban resilience in the face of climate change.
Ana Noemí Gomez’ doctoral thesis presents the Multidimensional Urban Flood Vulnerability Index (MUFVI), which integrates four dimensions (social, economic, environmental, and physical) and three components (exposure, susceptibility, and resilience). Its application in Girona (Catalonia, Spain) shows how these dimensions and components accumulate over time and help identifying long-term spatial patterns of vulnerability. Furthermore, combining the MUFVI index with hazard layers and combined sewer overflow points helps identify areas where repeated stressors accumulate over time and weaken resilience. Additionally, the thesis incorporates the Virtual City Simulator (VCS), a synthetic Mediterranean city composed of eight neighborhood typologies. This tool allows users to adjust indicator values, modify indicator and dimension weights, compare scenarios, and map how vulnerability may evolve in the future. The VCS is designed for data-scarce contexts, enabling robust diagnostics even when municipalities only have partial information.
Such developments can effectively support multicriteria decision-making processes (social, economic, environmental, physical) on urban water management, facilitating the sequence of benefits vs capital investments, as well as the prioritization of municipal interventions. The Virtual City Simulator has been released as an open research asset to facilitate replication, adaptation to new case studies, methodological extensions, and validation by other researchers.
The doctoral thesis was directed by Dr Ignasi Rodriguez-Roda and Dr Alexandra Popartan and developed in the Laboratory of Chemical and Environmental Engineering (LEQUIA) within the framework of CLEPSIDRA and D-PATTERN projects funded by the Spanish Research Agency AEI. LEQUIA is a multidisciplinary research group of the University of Girona renowned for its activity within the water field. The defence, which is open to the public, will be held on Friday 23rd January 2026 at 16:00h, at UdG Faculty of Sciences (carrer Mª Aurèlia Capmany 61, Campus Montilivi, 17003 Girona).