Urban Sprawl in Wadi Goss Watershed (Jeddah City/Western Saudi Arabia) and Its Impact on Vulnerability and Flood Hazards

Abstract

Today, climate change imposes enormous challenges on a global scale. The interactions of the balances between the need for development, population growth, massive urbanization generate a negative impact on the presence of these climate changes. One of the direct consequences of these changes is the phenomenon of flash floods, a phenomenon that hit the city of Jeddah (city located in west of Saudi Arabia) twice, one in 2009 and the other in 2011, causing significant human and material damage. Floods are considered as a direct result of the combination of extreme weather and hydrological phenomena; in most cases, the magnitude of these floods is magnified by anthropogenic factors, which increases the risk. According to the risk triangle, risk is defined as a probabilistic function that depends on three essential elements: exposure, vulnerability and hazard. If any of these three elements undergo growth the risk also does so and vice versa. Exposure and vulnerability will depend on the presence of human activities in the study area. This study is conducted on the Wadi Goss watershed as it was one of the most violent basins during the 2009 and 2011 floods. Indeed, we present in this study the extent of the urban extension in the Wadi Goss watershed, since 1984 to days and this by the using Landsat images. Given the nature of the study area, we present a method based on the calculation of various indices followed by a classification operation in order to define the urbanized zones inside the Wadi Goss watershed and then estimate the urban sprawl inside the watershed. We also present in this paper, the characteristics of the watershed as well as the evolution of the urbanized areas exposed to the phenomenon of floods and their contribution to the changes of the hydrological behavior of the basin, and to increase the evolution of the risk of the floods. We have shown through this study that the urban footprint has increased from 90 hectares in 1985 to 850 hectares in 2015. This urban footprint represents 12% of the total area of the watershed. Most of the urban evolution was operated on the wadi area with a concentration in the western part of the basin and especially at its outlet.