Urban growth patterns of Mediterranean cities and their flood risk: possible applications of NBS in the context of climate change

Urban areas in the Mediterranean are currently some of the areas that are most exposed to the effects of climate change due to flooding. The growing increase in the cold drop episodes (as they were previously referred to), both in intensity and frequency, has generated the so-called DANA phenomena with numerous deaths and considerable economic damage in recent years in countries such as Spain. This requires rethinking flood risk mitigation strategies in these environments, where the traditional approach of constructing hydraulic infrastructures for risk mitigation and flood lamination is, in many cases, economically unaffordable, or even technically impossible. In this context, the implementation of nature-based solutions can be a very interesting approach as an operational tool in the future. However, this should not be approached from a segmented view, but from within the framework of an integrated strategy that combines the diagnosis and subsequent analysis of errors in urban and territorial planning to implement actions that are effective in this matter on a large scale. In this work, various case studies of the Spanish Mediterranean façade subjected to the problems of flooding due to climate change are exposed and analyzed using GIS tools and indicators, proposing various strategies and mitigation actions in relation to the risk of flooding based on the improvement of urban planning and management of the territory as a nature-based solution.