SOCIAL VULNERABILITY IN FLOOD-PRONE URBAN AREA IN THE LENHEIRO BASIN IN SÃO JOÃO DEL – REI – MG

Abstract

Floods are frequent during raining periods in many Brazilian cities, and the drainage basin is a unit for studies and disaster management. The difficulty is to manage and plan the urban problems in areas of basins with significant urbanized extensions, where the impacts and precarious infrastructure increase the socioeconomic losses in rainy periods. Multicriteria Analysis and Hierarchical Analysis of Criteria have been used to model natural and man-made phenomena. In this way, this manuscript shows an approach that it was possible to do both: to map and model these areas which tend to be flooded, and to indicate a measurement of population vulnerability in the basin “Córrego do Lenheiro”. First, the theoretical framework about the terms disaster, risk, hazard and vulnerability is presented. After, the text shows how the adopted methodological procedures allowed the development of maps and models, which could be used as a support for planning and managing the flooding risk areas, as well as indicating the vulnerability of the citizens before and after  a disaster.