Managing the flooding system's resiliency to climate change

Abstract

An increasing lack of stationarity in environmental phenomena and hence in the predictability of loading and effects makes it necessary to modify the traditional approach for planning and risk assessment of flood mitigation. The traditional approach attempts to manage the flooding system with the use of predictive/optimisation methods. These use the ‘most likely’ or average future projection to identify a singular optimal adaptation strategy. Because the planning and risk management in this method is often decoupled from the dynamics and uncertainty of the flooding system, this is a rather risky approach. This paper argues that responsible climate adaptation requires an alternative approach that attempts to assess and manage the resiliency of the flooding system for long-term future change. The aim of such an approach is to keep the system within a configuration of states that gives at least acceptable functioning despite the occurrence of possible changes. The paper proposes an options planning and assessment process for managing the resiliency of the flooding system to climate change. This process explicitly acknowledges the uncertainty in future climate conditions by introducing and implementing flexibility (real options) into the designed components of the flooding system.