Work

Beyond engineering resilience: a systems-based collaborative planning framework for flood resilience

Year: 2026

Type: review

Abstract: Increasing flood risk, exacerbated by climate change and rapid urbanisation, has revealed the significant limitations of traditional ‘predict-and-control’ frameworks for flood resilience planning. Despite global policy discussions promoting flood resilience, implementation often conflates it with conventional flood protection. In practice, this results in static engineering investments that focus narrowly on resisting immediate hazard impacts, while neglecting the recovery and adaptive capacities that distinguish flood resilience from conventional flood protection and are essential for reducing vulnerability and injustice over time. Synthesising recent evidence (2015–2025), this paper explains why engineering-centred approaches still persist in flood resilience planning, highlighting reinforcing mechanisms in institutions, professional practice, finance, and governance. Building on socioecological and sociotechnical resilience scholarship, it then proposes a systems-based collaborative planning approach that operationalises resilience as a systemic capacity rather than an attribute of individual assets. The framework integrates the theory of complexity (also referred to as Systems thinking) with collective action to map feedback loops between technical infrastructure, power relations and social learning, and explicitly repositions engineering expertise as a technical resource within a collaborative planning cycle. The paper concludes that genuine flood resilience requires justice-informed and uncertainty-aware planning that deliberately strengthens communities’ capacities to absorb, recover, and adapt to floods, and is co-produced with affected communities rather than delivered solely through engineered physical reinforcements.

Source: Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability

DOI: 10.1016/j.cosust.2026.101697

Authors: Sabuhi Essa, Nazia Habib, Sivasakthy Selvakumaran

Institution: University of Cambridge

Language: English

Topic: Flood Risk Assessment and Management

Subfield: Global and Planetary Change

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,200