13/01/2026
📢 🎓 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 Noemi Gomez Vaca
📅 Friday 23rd January 2026, 16:00h, Facultat_de_Ciències Universitat_de_Girona and online
Supervised by Ignasi Rodriguez-Roda Layret and Alexandra Popartan
1️⃣ The thesis addresses the need to incorporate long-term vulnerability in floods' risk management, understood as the combination of exposure, susceptibility, and adaptive capacity. 🌊
2️⃣ To this end, it presents the Multidimensional Urban Flood Vulnerability Index (MUFVI), which integrates four dimensions (social, economic, environmental, and physical) and three components (exposure, susceptibility, and resilience). The application of MUVI index in Girona shows how these dimensions and components accumulate over time and help identifying long-term spatial patterns of vulnerability. 🏙️ 💧
3️⃣ Additionally, the thesis incorporates the Virtual City Simulator (VCS), a synthetic Mediterranean city composed of eight neighborhood typologies to facilitate replication, adaptation to new case studies, methodological extensions, and validation by other researchers. 💻 🏙️ 💧
4️⃣ IMPACT: 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.
