Collective Capacity: Regional Information Sharing in Support of Floodplain Management

Abstract

An approach for assessing regional receptivity to flood risk reduction is presented, taking into account institutional, cultural, and technical capacities. Since floodplain boundaries often cross multiple jurisdictions it is important to view the management of flood hazards within a regional context. In order to be effective, mitigation strategies should include some measure of the social system itself. This is necessary to ensure that the proper measures are being applied to the proper community. Attempts to evaluate regional receptivity based on resident floodplain management practices are therefore provided, with emphasis placed on non-structural approaches to hazards mitigation. The Red River of the North, which straddles the US/Canadian border, was chosen as the study area of choice owed largely to its repeated history of extreme flood events in combination with a relatively advanced means of coping with them. In order to construct the risk reduction evaluation templates presented, cross-border communications patterns were assessed, expressed user needs for region-wide information sharing were consolidated, and potentially transferable functional areas were isolated. The results suggest a risk-sharing framework that is suited for performing inter-basin comparisons.