Abstract
While flood risk is evolving as one of the most imminent natural hazards and the shift from a reactive decision environment to a proactive one sets the basis of the latest thinking in flood management, the need to equip decision makers with necessary tools to think about and intelligently select options and strategies for flood management is becoming ever more pressing. Within this context, the Preparing for Extreme and Rare Events in Coastal Regions (PEARL) intelligent knowledge-base (PEARL KB) of resilience strategies is presented here as an environment that allows end-users to navigate from their observed problem to a selection of possible options and interventions worth considering within an intuitive visual web interface assisting advanced interactivity. Incorporation of real case studies within the PEARL KB enables the extraction of (evidence-based) lessons from all over the word, while the KB’s collection of methods and tools directly supports the optimal selection of suitable interventions. The Knowledge-Base also gives access to the PEARL KB Flood Resilience Index (FRI) tool, which is an online tool for resilience assessment at a city level available to authorities and citizens. We argue that the PEARL KB equips authorities with tangible and operational tools that can improve strategic and operational flood risk management by assessing and eventually increasing resilience, while building towards the strengthening of risk governance. The online tools that the PEARL KB gives access to were demonstrated and tested in the city of Rethymno, Greece.
Highlights
In the context of climate variability and flood management, vulnerability and resilience are two basic terms widely used within the research and decision making community
The PEARL Knowledge Base (KB) Flood Resilience Index (FRI) tool at the city scale for Rethymno enabled the extraction of the following results in terms of city’s resilience and the assessment of the resilience level for each
The PEARL KB guides the users from the identification of vulnerabilities in their region, to the targeted selection of suitable measures that would improve the resilience of the urban area, while showing cases in which the selected measures have been successfully applied and linking to related knowledge evidence
Summary
In the context of climate variability and flood management, vulnerability and resilience are two basic terms widely used within the research and decision making community. A better understanding of vulnerability and resilience from a multidimensional human development perspective allows for a deeper analysis of the key factors and policies that explain why some individuals, communities or countries are more resilient to adverse events and respond better to them Within this setting, assessing and measuring resilience is a new and rapidly developing area of research and practice for which several resilience frameworks have been developed [4]. Another part is supporting direct vulnerability and resilience assessment as part of the decision process and to that effect the PEARL KB was enriched using the FRI framework [6].
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