Mitigating Complex Flood Risks in Southern Chile in a Particular Spatial Planning Context: Towards a Sustainable Strategy

Abstract

Effectively mitigating flood risk in fluvial environments in Chile characterized by intense volcanism, cryosphere changes, high relief energy and influenced by multiple disturbances, is particularly challenging, and strategies developed in different contexts such as the European Alps might not be directly transferrable to the Chilean setting. But planning and acting in dire straits might also bring about novel approaches to tackle wicked problems. Here, rather than adopting mitigation concepts that showed, under more favourable conditions, to be only partially effective elsewhere, we discuss a bottom up, participatory approach that aims at holistically achieving flood mitigation facing compound limitations. This approach entails the creation of an inclusive risk culture that could enable anticipated action avoiding settlement expansions that may irreversibly increase exposure and diminish the available management options. In the context of a foresighted spatial planning, we propose sustainable innovative solutions that can achieve substantial risk mitigation effects through a targeted interaction with the hazard processes, rather than aiming at preventing their occurrence. It is argued that a wise fusion of direct and indirect mitigation measures planned in a truly participatory way, constitutes, in the long term, the basis for a sustainable future for societies living in risk prone areas in Southern Chile.