Chapter 9 - Sustainable floodplain management and participatory planning in the red river basin, canada

Abstract

This chapter presents a new methodology and its application to the Red River basin flood management. This methodology is able to evaluate potential alternatives based on multiple criteria under uncertainty; accommodate the high diversity and uncertainty inherent in human preferences; and handle a large amount of data collected from stakeholders in the Red River basin. Flood management, in general, comprises of different water resources activities aimed at reducing potential harmful impact of floods on people, environment, and economy of a region. Sustainable flood-management decision making requires integrated consideration of economic, ecological, and social consequences of disastrous floods. While economic consideration gets priority in traditional approaches of decision-making, empowerment of stakeholders is an issue that is demanding increasing attention nowadays in many decision-making processes. Flood management activities (i.e., disaster mitigation, preparedness, and emergency management) may be designed and achieved without the direct participation of stakeholders. Flood-management decision-making problems are complex due to their multicriteria nature. For a given goal, many alternative solutions may exist that provide different level of satisfaction for different issues, such as environmental, social, institutional, and political. These concerns naturally lead to the use of multicriteria decision-making techniques in which trade-off is performed among the single objectives to find out the most desirable solution.