- Flood Management: an examination of mitigation measures for flooding in urban areas in Trinidad    1717 kb by    Udika, Rudo | rudo_udika@hotmail.com    Short Outline Flooding can erode sustainable development efforts in developing countries. Physical planning provides a proactive approach to flood management. It can mitigate flood impacts arising from rapid urbanization. Abstract Floods have the greatest damage potential of all natural hazards worldwide and affect the greatest number of people. In the Caribbean flooding frequently devastates communities. A lack of effective mechanisms to manage urbanization in Trinidad has resulted in an intolerable occurrence of flooding. Trinidad’s urban development challenges are fundamentally rooted in its historical physical development processes entangled with inadequate land use planning. By the late 1970s, 60 percent of the population were already urban dwellers and 40 percent were huddled along the sprawling corridor that penetrates east and west of the capital region to create the East- West Corridor. Here, flooding is a legacy of unmanaged urbanization that is exacting a predictable punishment. Some expect the flooding could get worse as climate change proceeds, potentially bringing more periods of intense rainfall to the small island. Flood management requires a proactive approach to urban land use planning for disaster risk reduction. Mitigation solutions must reflect the human dimension and must also consider the impacts of changing land use on flooding. In this regard the paper seeks to demonstrate how Trinidad’s current land use planning framework does not adequately respond to the evolving challenges of sustainable urban growth for flood management. It explores the impacts of rapid urbanization without proper land use management and discusses the intertwined conditions which erode attempts for sound flood management. In its recommendations, this paper advances the view that land use planning for integrated flood management is crucial to resolve urban flood challenges. In this regard integration of structural and non- structural mitigation measures is a key component. Keywords Urbanization, flood management, structural and non- structural measures, Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2010: Sustainable City - Developing World   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper