Assessing expansive soils evolution under climate change for promoting resilient urban planning

The building and insurance sectors consider that Expansive Soils is one of the most significant risk for buildings and urban planning. Different strategies are used in order to avoid or mitigate this hazard but, before applying these techniques, it is necessary assessing the potential areas exposed to such hazard on a territory. In the perspective of developing sustainable and resilient buildings, this assessment must be carried out by taking into account current and future environmental situations.
We propose a model based on geological and climatic data in order to assess the potential exposure of buildings in a territory in France. We also use our climatic downscaling model named TLALOC in order to estimate the soil moisture level at 5m of spatial resolution. We also selected the geological layers considered are at risk of soil expansion, according to their content in clays and hydromorphic minerals (smectite, vermiculite etc.). 
The following maps show the current exposure of building in the area of the cities of Aubenas and Privas in Ardèche department (France), for the current and future situation, according to the RCP4.5 scenario provided by the IPCC.

The results show a potential evolution of soils expansion in 2050 according to the current situation.
They show a general increase of the level of risk for the buildings and many areas.
We present here the evolution of the amount of building exposed to soil expansion hazard according to the current and future situations at Aubenas. We take into account three levels of exposure. The quantitative results show a shift of building exposure to higher level or risk for the future. This info can help decision makers in order to manage such hazard and risk at local level.

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