My name is Bas van de Sande, 24 years old, and I am a student of the Masters program “Geo Information Science and Remote Sensing” at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. I am conducting the thesis of this program in cooperation with Royal Haskoning concerning a topic which is closely related to the described project.

The Coastal Flooding Management Study project relies on many GIS (Geo Information System) components. Especially the coastal flood risk assessment mainly consists of GIS oriented modelling. The project area is rather large (180 km coastline including lower lying inlands). However, focus areas will be necessary to reveal the coastal flooding risk on city and on neighbourhood scale. The purpose of my internship is executing an assessment on the usability of various GIS datasets for this project. The various focusing scales of the flood risk assessment need to be coupled to the appropriate gathered GIS datasets, in order to secure the quality of the flood risk maps.

Gathering GIS data at ministries and institutions, surveys and fieldwork are my main activities here in Lagos. Fieldwork is really essential to get an impression of the environment, its logics, and the astonishing and extreme urban conditions in megacity Lagos. The impressions of the fieldwork will be taken along with the conventional GIS flood risk modelling techniques, in order to create adequate and location specific flood risk maps.

Description of project

This Plan forms a strong basis for technical intervention measures, urban planning and institutional frameworks. Result of this study is a comprehensive Coastal Flooding Management Plan. This Plan will include detailed maps of the coastal strip showing areas which are most vulnerable to flooding. Also, the plan will include (technical) measures which can effectively combat the threat of coastal flooding and erosion. The project will be executed over a period of about a year.