Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Flooding as natural hazard has led to an evolution of approaches for the mitigation of its impacts. Initially, humankind was exposed to floods as natural phenomenon without any influence during most of its history of development. An early and first paradigm of actively dealing with floods evolved in the Egyptian culture thousands of years ago. It involved flood management through flood observation and construction of minor dams and channels accompanied by adapted land use. This paradigm formed also the basis for building dikes in The Netherlands and other parts of Europe from the 9th century onwards. Until this day, it is the background for constructing major dams, straightening and relocating rivers and realising thousands of miles of flood defences worldwide. Due to emphasis on protection against inundation, this first paradigm is called ‘flood protection’. During the International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) from 1990 to 1999, a second paradigm has been proposed which bears on the recognition that absolute flood protection is unachievable and unsustainable, because of high costs and inherent uncertainties. Instead, risk as probability of negative consequences due to floods is in the centre. And this risk can only be reduced to a tolerable level. The paradigm of ‘risk management’ initiated a more comprehensive view of the generation of flood impacts. Consideration of the flood risk system ranges from the flood hazard to the flood vulnerability and its exposure. Moreover uncertainties in the risk concept, and especially uncertainty quantifiable as probability, express restriction of impact mitigation for events that do not exceed a pre-defined likelihood. This requires tolerance of residual risk. In the last decade, flood risk management has become the predominant approach in science and practice in many regions of the world as visible e.g. in the European Floods Directive. It also encompasses most elements of the first paradigm and so it is sometimes not easy to identify the degree of shift from one to another in flood risk management practice. Following the elaboration and implementation of risk management, the concept of resilience became more prominent in the disaster science literature and in policy documents such as the United Nations Hyogo Framework of Action 2005–2015. It originated from psychology of the 1950's and ecology of the 1970's and has gained more attention in the environmental sciences and other fields since the beginning of the 21st century. In line with that, it was quickly adopted in flood risk management e.g. as an engineering dimension of vulnerability in recent years. In parallel, social scientists have shown the explanatory potential of resilience for the recovery of people and communities at risk. After some efforts in this respect, the questions about the more general meaning of the resilience concept for flood impact mitigation occurs and whether it is paving the way towards a new paradigm. To try to give an initial answer to these questions, resilience needs brief explanation. Resilience has no universally accepted meaning and therefore may just be understood as ‘boundary object’. However, as a kind of key feature it can be recognised as the system's ability to retain characteristic elements, structures and processes (and capacity to re-organise while undergoing alteration) in case of sudden disturbance (e.g. hazardous event) or creeping change (e.g. climate and land-use change) of system's boundary conditions. Resilience differs from resistance as ability to withstand disturbance. Both are descriptive in the first instance; evaluation needs goals or targets. There are some areas of flood impacts and their mitigation where resilience plays a role. Human beings can be the subject of psychological and medical resilience, their neighbourhoods and networks of social resilience. Constructions such as buildings and infrastructure may be addressed from the view of engineering resilience. Ability to retain ecosystems depends on ecological resilience. Local and regional markets have an economic resilience. Lastly, risk management strategies and governance regimes may be seen from the perspective of (inter-)organisational resilience. Further areas of resilience can be identified by individual disciplines. Socio-ecological resilience not only involves all these areas but additionally puts them in complex interrelation. For instance, resilience of the built environment may affect social, economic and organisational resilience. However, numerous single areas of resilience and particularly their interrelation are not well understood so far although the number of scientific papers using the term resilience in a more or less specific way recently have begun to exceed several hundreds a year. From some of these publications it seems to be possible to derive some features going beyond flood risk management as the current flood impact mitigation approach. One of these features is the dynamic performance of receptors of flood impacts with their ability to ‘bounce back’ after an event, possibly undergoing re-organisation. Vulnerability accordingly reaches a process-related notion beyond the common surveying of people and assets at risk and contributes to overcome the static description of risk with resulting design levels for risk reduction. Beyond analysis of previous events and revision of calculations, statistics and design levels, it also requires learning aptitudes. Hereby, the intention is to gain insights from the unexpected course of events and to build capacities for future unknowns. It thus complements anticipation of probable and even possible events and focusses the abilities of retaining characteristic elements, structures and processes of the flood risk system even under unforeseeable conditions. Against this brief look on the comprehensive meaning of the resilience concept, it can be seen as candidate for a new paradigm of flood impact mitigation. This paradigm again does not replace but enhances the previous one. It introduces resilience as part of vulnerability in general and physical, social, economic and ecological coping capacity as one component of vulnerability in more particular. Hence, the meaning of vulnerability does not only become more important, it unfolds a systemic and dynamic dimension. At the same time, learning aptitudes from the unexpected course of previous events and enhancement of response capacities among others receive special relevance in risk management strategies and governance regimes. The paradigm could be designated as ‘flood resilience’ as part of comprehensive flood risk management. Further effort is required to fully uncover and operationalise all potentials of the resilience concept for flood impact mitigation and to finally answer the questions on the new paradigm. For example, there is the requirement for relating selected disciplinary resilience concepts to represent the socioecological resilience of the flood risk system. In addition, accelerating climate and societal change pose the challenge of how to combine scenario-based anticipation and capacity-oriented resilience. Moreover, investigation of (inter-)organisational resilience of local and regional flood risk management strategies and the governance regime lacks suitable theory and methodology. Last but not least, currently the concept may appears as rather academic, proper transfer and specification of its added values for flood risk management practice needs increasing attention.
Source: Journal of Flood Risk Management
DOI: 10.1111/jfr3.12170
Author: Jochen Schanze
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2158742025