Simulating Future Urban Expansion in Monastir, Tunisia, as an Input for the Development of Future Risk Scenarios

Under scenarios of urbanization coupled with increasing frequency and intensity of natural hazards, urban disaster risk is set to rise. Simulating future urban expansion can provide relevant information for the development of future exposure scenarios and the identification of targeted risk reduction and adaptation strategies. Here, we present an urban growth simulation for the coastal city of Monastir, Tunisia. The approach integrates local knowledge and a data-driven urban growth model to simulate urban sprawl up to 2030. A business-as-usual projection is used to predict the future growth of the city based on the historical trend. Thirteen Landsat images for the period 1975 to 2017 were used to delineate past changes in urban land cover following the European Urban Atlas standard, which served as the main input for the urban growth model. The simulation revealed that the city’s residential area is likely to grow by 127 ha to an overall size of 1,690 ha by 2030, corresponding to an increase of 8.1% compared to the urban footprint of 2017. The outcomes of the analysis presented here served as an input for the spatial simulation of future exposure to flash floods in the case study area.