Implementing resilience in flood risk management

Abstract

Flood resilience is increasingly discussed in academia and practice as a complement to existing flood risk management approaches (Fekete, Hartmann, & Jüpner 2020). It is seen as a promising concept to deal with increasingly severe consequences of climate change in general, and with increasing flood risk in particular. The debate on flood resilience is linked to the paradigm shift from flood protection to risk management, which started in Europe after the major river flood events in 1993 and 1995 along the river Rhine (Hartmann, 2012), and has developed over the past decades—pushed by further major fluvial and pluvial flood events (Begum, Stive, & Hall, 2007; Hartmann & Juepner, 2014; Klijn, Samuels, & van Os, 2008; Patt & Jüpner, 2020). However, in flood risk management, the academic debate on resilience is only in its infancy (Jüpner et al., 2018; Vis, Klijn, Bruijn, & Buuren, 2003). Many different definitions exist (Disse, Johnson, Leandro, & Hartmann, 2020). Especially when it comes to specific implementation of resilience, the vagueness of the concept—which is sometimes described as one of its strengths (Baggio, Brown, & Hellebrandt, 2015; Brand & Jax, 2007)—can present a problem. How to design a resilient hydraulic infrastructure? This question has not only technical but also concerned with financial and legal aspects. This becomes more complicated when individual protection measures are put in a context of a larger system, such as a city or a region. When and how is a system such as a city or a region resilient, and how does one measure resilience? These questions are important, not only for construction but also for legal (such as liabilities), financial (budgetary), and political reasons. In other words, resilience is not (yet) a ready-to-use concept in flood risk management. Resilience challenges presumptions of traditional flood risk management in many ways. Resilience implies that more and different stakeholders and actors will be involved in flood risk management than before, such as landowners or spatial planners. Hitherto, flood risk management has been and still is mainly the domain of water management (Hartmann & Driessen, 2017), although the prevalence of the traditional civil engineering approach has been questioned before (van den Brink, 2009). This change is not positive for all actors—affected homeowners, but also city planners or mayors now must deal with questions that were previously outside of their realm of competence and responsibility. From a flood risk management perspective, many questions arise, such as: How does resilience add to and change the existing flood risk management system? How can resilience contribute to a more effective and efficient flood risk management approach? What are the specific advantages of integrating resilience in flood risk management? How can resilience be measured and quantified? Which parameters are most relevant? This special collection brings together contributions from different disciplines that address the specific challenges of implementing resilience in flood risk management. The special collection takes the European debate as a starting point. The European Floods Directive from 2007 (2007/EC/60) pushed the debate on flood risk management and resilience in Europe. This Directive established a legal frame on how countries in the European Union have to deal with flood risk for the first time (Hartmann & Jüpner, 2014). At the same time, the shift toward a risk-based approach raised questions such as “what can happen?” “what must not happen?” and “which security level can be realized at which costs?” Ultimately, flood risk management replaces the paradigm of complete protection against floods with the idea of managing the risk (Grünewald, 2005). This makes approaches to resilience and the reduction of damage potential (vulnerabilities)—not only for river floods but also for pluvial rainfall—important. The first three papers in this collection highlight the necessity and consequences of defining the concept of resilience. In their opinion paper, Fekete, Hartmann, and Jüpner (2020) point out that resilience is indeed a trend that neither can nor should be ignored in flood risk management, rather than it should be embraced—with a caveat: the concept is still not exactly defined and cannot be understood as a panacea for all shortcomings and challenges of flood risk management. So, is resilience merely a new buzzword? Dewulf et al. (2019) discuss the power and impact of defining resilience and therewith unravel the political-normative notion of flood resilience as a concept. This illustrates that, with flood resilience, flood risk management turns much more strongly towards social and political science than ever before. Discussing resilience and its definition is thus a crucial step toward successfully implementing it in flood risk management. In her advanced review, Rodina (2019) reveals different notions of resilience in different disciplines when taking on a broader view of the concept (i.e., not solely focusing on flood risks). She concludes that participation and stakeholder involvement are important components of resilience—a theme that is picked up in the next section of this special collection as well. So, though this article had not been part of the original set-up of the special collection, the conclusions are highly relevant for implementing flood resilience in flood risk management. Resilience requires more action by homeowners and citizens. All papers in this section of this special collection leave no doubt about that. Snel, Witte, Hartmann, and Geertman (2020), however, start with a very critical point of departure, namely that many publications on homeowner and citizen involvement do not seem to question if this involvement is necessary. The paper unravels the arguments that are prevalent in the academic debate for more involvement of homeowners in flood resilience, which supposedly comes along with a shift towards flood governance. Four types of main arguments are identified and discussed in the paper. Kuhlicke and the multidisciplinary team of authors writing on the behavioral turn in flood risk management (Kuhlicke et al., 2020) discuss in detail three underlying assumptions of increased involvement of citizens in flood risk management: the motivations of citizens, the effectiveness of measures, and capacities of citizens. In this vein, Rufat et al. (2020) discuss in their opinion paper need for a more nuanced debate on the link between flood risk perception and risk-mitigating behavior. Attems, Thaler, Genovese, and Fuchs (2020) then provide an overview of the measures that homeowners can take to enhance resilience by using property-level flood risk adaptation (PLFRA) measures. The paper confirms that such measures can indeed be an appropriate addition or complement to flood risk management. The third group of papers in this special collection addresses the issue of measuring and communicating resilience. The need for this comes not only from hydraulic engineering but also from the need to communicate about flood risk with homeowners and citizens, as they have to become more involved (as the earlier papers in this special collection clearly show). Pohl (2020) views resilience from a hydrological as well as a hydraulic engineering perspective and outlines what it means to include the concept in flood risk management. In particular, the contribution points out the difficulties of embedding resilience as a design criterion in hydraulic structures. Pohl concludes that—though the fuzziness of resilience is appreciated by some social scientists as a “boundary concept” (Baggio et al., 2015)—hydraulic engineering and hydrology inevitably require some quantifiable measurement of resilience. Fekete (2019) elaborates in his paper how cascading effects and critical infrastructure matter for flood resilience. It thereby shows how flood resilience with this perspective extends existing flood risk management approaches. Cascading effects of critical infrastructure can substantially affect the measurement of flood resilience. Schmitt and Scheid (2020) discuss the need for better risk communication and discuss approaches by focusing on pluvial floods. In particular, they show how a rainstorm severity index may supersede the communicative capacity of statistical rainfall parameters in the communication with nonexperts especially. In conclusion, the contributions in this special collection show how the concept of resilience is advancing flood risk management but also point out some crucial changes and challenges that flood resilience as a concept brings to the practical implementation of flood risk management. It seems inevitable that homeowners especially will play a much more fundamental role in flood resilience, which raises needs for measuring and communication of flood resilience. Along with this shift in flood risk management, the papers illustrate that flood resilience puts flood risk management in a hitherto unknown domain for many water managers, as flood resilience means embracing social and political science. Embedding flood resilience into flood risk management becomes a balancing act—on the one hand, resilience is a political and normative concept, but on the other hand, it needs to be implemented with concrete steps designed via civil engineering and hydrology. This tension is still unsolved and remains a dilemma in implementing flood resilience.