A typology of community flood resilience

Abstract

Flood risk is increasing worldwide and there is a growing need to better understand the co-benefits of investments in disaster resilience. Utilizing a multinational community flood resilience dataset, this paper takes a systems approach to understanding community-level flood resilience. Using a cluster analysis and bivariate correlation methods, we develop a typology of community flood resilience capacity based on community characteristics and five capitals (human, financial, natural, physical, and social). Our results reinforce the importance of context-specific policymaking and give recommendations of four distinct clusters to investigate the relationship between flood resilience and prevailing development conditions. We especially find that communities with higher interactions between their capital capacities tend to have higher flood resilience levels. Additionally, there are indications that stronger interactions between community capacities can help to induce multiple co-benefits when investing in disaster resilience. Our results also have important policy implications on the individual community level. For example, based on our results, we suggest that communities with lower flood resilience capacities and interactions can best build resilience on leveraging their relatively higher human capital capacities to strengthen the financial and social capitals. Negative effects might happen for urban communities when co-benefits of natural and physical capital are not fully integrated. The highest flood resilience capacity is found in communities with a well-balanced household income distribution which is likely a contributing factor to the importance of financial capital for this cluster. Our results emphasize the importance of an integrative approach to management when implementing systematic flood disaster resilience metrics and development measures.