Abstract
Abstract. Due to a number of recent high-profile flood events and the apparent threat from global warming, governments and their agencies are under pressure to make proactive investments to protect people living in floodplains. However, adopting a proactive approach as a universal strategy is not affordable. It has been argued that delaying expensive and essentially irreversible capital decisions could be a prudent strategy in situations with high future uncertainty. This paper firstly uses Monte Carlo simulation to explore the performance of proactive and reactive investment strategies using a rational cost–benefit approach in a natural system with varying levels of persistence/interannual variability in annual maximum floods. It is found that, as persistence increases, there is a change in investment strategy optimality from proactive to reactive. This could have implications for investment strategies under the increasingly variable climate that is expected with global warming. As part of the emerging holistic approaches to flood risk management, there is increasing emphasis on stakeholder participation in determining where and when flood protection investments are made, and so flood risk management is becoming more people-centred. As a consequence, multiple actors are involved in the decision-making process, and the social sciences are assuming an increasingly important role in flood risk management. There is a need for modelling approaches which can couple the natural and human system elements. It is proposed that coupled human and natural system (CHANS) modelling could play an important role in understanding the motivations, actions and influence of citizens and institutions and how these impact on the effective delivery of flood protection investment. A framework for using agent-based modelling of human activities leading to flood investments is outlined, and some of the challenges associated with implementation are discussed.
Highlights
Due to the perceived threat from climate change, prediction under changing climatic and hydrological conditions has become a dominant theme of hydrological research
Adaptation fundamentally involves how humans may respond to increasing flood and drought hazards by changing their strategies, activities and behaviours, which are coupled in complex ways to the natural systems within which they live and work
This is attributable both to the growth in vulnerability of people and their property, priority and economic activities in floodplains, and to the possible increase in flood hazard from global warming. This reappraisal has been driven by the EU Floods Directive (Directive 2007/60/EC), which requires that flood risk management plans must be prepared and published by member states, and that stakeholder engagement should be an integral part of this process
Summary
Due to the perceived threat from climate change, prediction under changing climatic and hydrological conditions has become a dominant theme of hydrological research. Humans are major agents of change in hydrological systems, and representing human activities and behaviours in coupled human and natural hydrological system models is needed to gain insight into the complex interactions that take place, and to inform adaptation decision-making. Due to the apparent threat from global warming, governments and their agencies are under pressure to make proactive investments to protect people living in floodplains from the perceived increasing flood hazard Adopting this as a universal strategy everywhere is not affordable, in times of economic stringency, and since widespread solid evidence of increasing flood hazard. 2. The way in which multiple stakeholders interact to influence/determine flood investment decisions is reviewed, and we explore how the human system component of a CHANS modelling approach to flood protection investment might be represented. We focus on how agent-based modelling might be used to represent the various stakeholders that are involved in, or influence, flood protection investment, and the interactions that take place between them, in determining when and where in a region flood investments take place
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