2025 Reports

Flood Risk in the Buenos Aires-La Plata Metropolitan Area

Castro-Diaz, Iván Ricardo; Massachesi, Nelson

The Buenos Aires-La Plata Metropolitan Area is the largest urban agglomeration in Argentina and currently prone to flooding based on geography, climate and the multiple sub- and superficial watercourses. As resilience emerges as a key factor to reduce the impact of climate disasters and is referred to as the ability to absorb shocks and reorganize into adaptive cycles, it might represent better contextual conditions for human habitat. A result of improving resilience is the decreasing of social vulnerability, as decreasing limitations it improves better responses to disasters (Castro-Díaz & Natenzon, 2018; Massachesi & Castro-Díaz, 2023). In this case, building flood resilience in cities is the set of strategies to avoid the floods or mitigate the impact in the disaster context.

For understanding social vulnerability as a counterpart to resilience, we developed a Social Vulnerability to Disaster Index (SVDI), explained by demographic, employment, education and non-material housing variables. The case study describes “very high” social vulnerability in seven departments (Moreno, Malvinas Argentinas, Ezeiza, General Rodríguez, José C.Paz, Presidente Perón, and Almirante Brown) out of the total department belonging to the urban agglomeration.

The context was based on The National Register of Popular Neighborhoods that identifies over 580,000 households living in 1,525 informal settlements in the Buenos Aires-La Plata Metropolitan Area on almost 1,200,000 households in the Argentinean territory, where 5,686 informal settlements (RENABAP, 2023), that calls urgent actions for developing flood resilience to mitigate extreme rainfall, while reducing social vulnerabilities by improving access to services, employment, and education. As a response, the city government promoted the "Buenos Aires Resilient" strategy aiming to build resilience through pillars focused on environment, social integration, risk management, and more. This connotation has been seen from the perspective of reducing social vulnerability in informal neighborhoods as key to achieve flood resilience across the entire metropolitan area.