Community flood resilience assessment frameworks: a review

Abstract

In response to the inadequacy of flood control infrastructures under uncertainties, building community resilience has become a vital concern in modern flood risk management for flood mitigation and recovery options. Relatedly, there has been growing recognition of the importance of community flood resilience measurement, and several tools to measure resilience have been introduced since the turn of this century. However, overall yield from resilience works can be compromised if the measurements do not conform to theoretical basis. By identifying evaluation methodology which takes the multifaceted nature of resilience into account, this study analyzed existing community flood resilience measurement tools. The results show that the importance of assessing and enhancing community competence in flood resilience building is unnoticed by the majority of the analyzed frameworks. Adopting a participatory approach and measurement under uncertainties are overlooked by a significant proportion of the frameworks. Moreover, issues of spatial and temporal interdependencies have received less attention. Consequently, the multi faceted nature of resilience appears inadequately addressed in existing frameworks, and measurements of community flood resilience tend to be inconsistent. The study would support efforts being made to improve consistency and effectiveness community flood resilience measurements and to operationalize the concept of resilience in flood disaster management.