Flood Governance Research Articles

Diversified flood governance and related socio-spatial vulnerability in Tana River County, Kenya.

What are the consequential socio-spatial vulnerabilities of fragmentation in flood risk governance (FRG) functions in Tana River County, Kenya? To answer the question, this paper utilises social differentiation theory to establish types and consequences of such fragmentation. It applies theoretical patterns and processes of social differentiation to expose that FRG diversification could result in fragmentation of FRG functions. The study employs an interview strategy that focuses on governmental and non-governmental FRG actors. The results reveal that fragmented FRG functions in Tana River County was not an intentional policy decision, but rather a product of a transitional vacuum between policy promulgation and implementation. Furthermore, socio-spatial vulnerabilities differentiated by patterns and processes related to age, gender, disability, and ethnicity, for instance, are consequential outcomes of fragmented FRG functions in the Tana River floodplains. The study recommends implementation of the National Disaster Management Policy in Tana River County and institutionalisation of a specific FRG policy and legal framework.

Quantifying flood risks during monsoon and post-monsoon seasons: An integrated framework for resource-constrained coastal regions

Global coastal regions are transforming into “flooding hot-spots” due to the multi-faceted confluence of several flood-drivers. Unfortunately, these regions are often poorly gauged, hindering comprehensive flood hazard quantification. Besides summer-monsoon floods, post-monsoon rainfalls induced by cyclonic-depressions have escalated the flood risks in the coastal regions. For the first time, the present study captures the seasonal flood hazards by disentangling monsoon (June, July, August, and September) and post-monsoon (October, November, and December) periods of rainfall. An integrated MIKE + 1D-2D coupled model was used to generate flood hazard risks for Jagatsinghpur district (Odisha, India), a resource-constrained multi-hazard catchment in the Lower Mahanadi River Basin. Due to limited data for this coastal region, we investigated the performance of CHIRPS v2.0, a global Satellite Precipitation Product (SPP) with high spatiotemporal characteristics, for capturing extreme rainfall events and deriving flood hazards at the inundation scale. We observed higher magnitude of flood hazards are prominent in the coastal villages, emerging from a complex interaction between rainfall and storm-tide events. Three widely used Archimedean copulas were implemented to capture the rainfall and storm-tide events' joint (bivariate) behavior and their implications on population exposure, which is valuable for mapping flood hazard risks. We observed that univariate analysis (Ua) significantly underestimates the flood hazard over bivariate analysis (Ba) during both periods. Interestingly, the results are more pronounced in the population exposure estimates as ∼47 % (monsoon) and ∼54 % (post-monsoon) of the population are exposed based on univariate analysis against ∼65 % (monsoon) and ∼60 % (post-monsoon) under bivariate analysis. Our study highlights the necessity of disentangling rainfall time-series for foreseeing under-shadowed flood risks, vital for designing flood combating structures, evacuation plans, land use planning, and flood governance. The results further enhance our understanding of monsoon and post-monsoon flood hazards and their associated risks under different return periods.

Urban Flood Resilience Networks: Exploring the Relationship between Governance Networks, Networks of Plans, and Spatial Flood Resilience Policies in Four Coastal Cities

Coastal cities facing growing flood risks are increasingly focused on resilience. Academic and policy discourse present a resilience-based approach to governing hazards as more collaborative, better connecting threats, systems, and actors. Literature on governance networks, collaborative governance, and networks of plans suggests collaboration enhances resilience, but empirical studies of the relationship between governance networks, networks of plans, and resilience policies are limited. This study addresses this gap by examining collaboration patterns and plans in the context of flood resilience in four U.S. cities (Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, Boston, and Seattle). We use surveys and social network analysis to assess collaboration within the cities’ flood governance networks. We analyze cities’ networks of plans using three approaches: (1) plan quality evaluation, (2) plan cross-referencing, and (3) the spatial distribution and flood resilience impact of policies. We find that higher quality plans and those that integrate flood information are more likely to have policies reducing flood risk. Plans that are more connected to other plans also have higher plan quality scores and more flood information. At the city level, the relationship between collaboration across the governance networks and networks of plans appears more complex and requires additional research.

Interlinkages and gaps: a review of the literature on intergovernmental relations for flood management in the face of climate change

Current approaches to flood management are increasingly insufficient to deal with intensifying flood trends. In this paper, we define and map out the responsibilities and relationships of local, state, and federal governing entities at various levels. We use these relationships to identify gaps in governance needed to address the high financial, human, and infrastructure costs of flooding. This paper offers a description of current flood policies and provides recommendations for innovations in policy solutions to improve governance gaps. We identify three themes from the literature on intergovernmental relations and flood governance: (1) intergovernmental relations (interlinkages and gaps) for flood governance; (2) risks inherent to flood governance (financial, physical, social and individual, and perception of risk); (3) data adequacy and interoperability.

Evaluation of Urban Flood Governance Efficiency Based on the Data Envelopment Analysis Model and Malmquist Index: Evidence from 30 Provincial Capitals in China

Urban flooding disasters endanger people’s lives and property while causing significant economic damage to cities. To further improve the efficiency of urban flooding governance and promote the optimal allocation of resources, this article selects the number of people in flood control, medical and health security, financial expenditure on flood control, affected population, and direct economic loss as evaluation indicators from the input–output perspective; it measures the efficiency of urban flooding governance in 30 provincial capitals in China from 2012 to 2021 using the DEA model and Malmquist index method and identifies the key factors affecting the efficiency of urban flooding governance. The research results show that in 2021, the average value of the comprehensive technical efficiency of flood disaster governance in 30 provincial capitals in China was 0.408, the development trend was not optimistic, and the constraint factor was scale efficiency. The interannual average value of the total factor productivity index of urban flood disaster governance from 2012 to 2021 was 0.976, and the overall trend was decreasing year by year, during which some cities were able to achieve a yearly increase in governance efficiency, but most cities still faced a severe situation in flood disaster governance. The total factor productivity index varied enormously across towns with the variation in annual precipitation; the greater the annual precipitation, the greater the total factor productivity index of urban flooding disaster governance in the urban agglomerations, and the comprehensive technical efficiency change was consistent with its trend change. This consistency has a positive contribution to the total factor productivity index of urban flooding disaster governance.

The need to reconfigure consistency and variability to best manage changing flood risks in Aotearoa-New Zealand

ABSTRACT Flooding is Aotearoa-New Zealand’s most frequent natural hazard, and there is high confidence that climate change is making extreme rainfall events more frequent and intense. Additionally, there are significant development pressures which could both increase the number of people and assets at risk and the flood hazard. To date, there is no publicly available consistent approach to accurately determine flood risk on a national scale, nor for how this may be changing; although there is a growing legislative requirement to provide quality information over multiple spatial scales. This paper draws on empirical data to gain insights on how to best manage changing flood risks in Aotearoa-New Zealand from the perspective of centrally organised entities. Findings confirm the need for a nationally consistent approach to flood risk management, better understanding of Aotearoa’s communities and their vulnerability to floods, equitable access to quality information and decision-support tools, and better understanding of the economic impacts on differing communities, regions and places. The paper concludes that to achieve a flood-resilient Aotearoa, flood governance needs to be reconfigured to achieve national consistency in flood risk management whilst enabling targeted variability at the local scale.

Exploring flood mitigation governance by estimating first-floor elevation via deep learning and google street view in coastal Texas

Flood mitigation governance is critical for coastal regions where flooding has caused considerable damage. Raising the First-Floor Elevation (FFE) above the base flood elevation (BFE) is an effective mitigation measure for buildings with a high risk of flooding. In the U.S., measuring FFE is necessary to obtain an Elevation Certificate (E.C.) for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and has traditionally required labor-consuming field surveys. However, the advances in computer vision technology have facilitated the handling of large image datasets, leading to new FFE measurement approaches. Taking Galveston Island (including the cities of Galveston and Jamaica Beach) in Coastal Texas as a case study, we explore how these new approaches may inform flood risk management and governance, including how FFE estimates may be combined with BFE estimates from flood inundation probability mapping to model the predicted cost of raising buildings’ FFE above their BFE. After establishing the FFE model’s accuracy by comparing its results with previously validated FFE estimates in three districts of Galveston, we generalize the workflow to building footprints across Galveston Island. By combining the FFE data derived from our workflow with multidimensional building information, we further analyze the future flood control and post-disaster maintenance strategies. Our findings present valuable data collection paradigms and methodological concepts that inform flood governance for Galveston Island. The proposed workflow can be extended to flood management and research for other vulnerable coastal communities.

Flood Governance: A Review on Allocation of Flood Victims Using Location-Allocation Model and Disaster Management in Malaysia

Flood management can be defined as the technique and strategy to reduce the risk and damage from flooding. The efficient strategies for the both short-term and long-term plans is needed in order to minimise losses and damage during disaster happen. Flood governance entails the need of a coordinated system in dealing with this natural disaster. The phases of the flood disaster management cycle such as flood preparedness, flood mitigation, Emergency Response Plan (ERP), and flood recovery helped the federal government and states government to overcome the flood disaster. In Malaysia, the disaster management undergoes three levels, where each level is governed by a committee with specified responsibilities. Flood disaster mitigation is crucial since it is possible to prevent damage that is brought upon by flood disaster. During the flood event, all the flood victims must be allocated to relief center. The allocation process needs to be conducted efficiently to avoid much worse incidents happening. The aims of this paper review are to explore the existing knowledge on flood mitigation and to identify Location-allocation model currently applied to solve allocation of flood victims to relief centre.The paper review is based on secondary data to give comparison and recommendation in achieving the objective. However, lack of coordination remains an issue that could potentially be tackled using a more efficient framework. Further researches are needed to test the effectiveness of this framework in improving flood governance.

Governing Resilience Planning: Organizational Structures, Institutional Rules, and Fiscal Incentives in Guangzhou

Researchers and policymakers have long called for a collaborative governance process for climate adaptation and flood resilience. However, this is usually challenging when urban planning is supposed to be integrated with water management. Using the Chinese city of Guangzhou as a case study, this study explores the long-term disadvantaged conditions of urban planning in flood governance and how this situation is shaped. The findings show that, in comparison to the increasingly dominant position of water management in flood affairs, the urban planning system has had weak powers, limited legitimate opportunities, and insufficient fiscal incentives from the 2000s to the late 2010s. Those conditions have been shaped by organizational structures, institutional rules, and financial allocation in urban governance, whose changes did not bring benefits to urban planning. The emergence of the Sponge City Program in China in 2017 and its implementation at the municipal level is deemed to be a new start for urban planning, considering the encouragement of nature-based solutions and regulatory tools in land use for flood resilience. Even so, the future of this program is still full of challenges and more efforts are needed.

Flood Policy and Governance: A Pathway for Policy Coherence in Nigeria

In recent years, Nigeria is witnessing increasing frequency of flood occurrence with devastating impact translating into significant loss of lives (in Nigeria, over 300 people died in September 2022) and properties. Addressing flood disaster requires holistic approach from policy and governance perspectives, integration of policies and programs and synergies between institutions. Using synergies and eliminating trade-offs, flood governance and policy coherence integrate all relevant policy fields and institutions to achieve common policy outcomes. The objective of this study is to examine and understand how flood governance and policy coherence are approached, as well as institutional design and implementation for coherence in Nigeria. The findings revealed that there is no single flood policy in Nigeria. Due to this, there is no focus and no defined objectives for flood governance, prevention, control, and management, and no imperative for the government to seek both short-term and long-term flood solutions. There is no synergy and coordination among institutions for flood governance in the country. Since the country established the federal ministry of environment in 1999, the environment, floods, and climate-related hazards were given less priority. State and local governments handle most flood disasters and emergencies. Federal assistance is provided, however, when flood disasters exceed the capabilities of local and state governments. This study recommends that across the country, flood policy needs to be designed, formulated, and implemented while assigning governance responsibility and decentralizing policy to state and local governments.

Climate governance at the fringes: Peri-urban flooding drivers and responses

There is a large body of scientific evidence on the climate crisis and flooding in urban areas. Extreme weather events are producing extensive property damage and loss of life and require new modes of flood governance. However, the climate crisis does not stop at the city limits: peri-urban areas have related but distinct flood challenges due to land use change, regulation, perceptions, and capacity to develop collective responses. The aim of the literature review is to synthesize peri-urban flood governance drivers and responses with a particular emphasis on empirical findings from the past decade. The literature review draws on findings from 26 empirical case studies with respect to how and where research is conducted on peri-urban flood governance, the drivers of peri-urban flooding, and the responses by peri-urban stakeholders to address flood risks. A common governance approach involves autonomous adaptation that results in maladaptation – both of which are critiqued as inadequate to address flood risks. The findings reveal a host of specific peri-urban challenges in addressing flooding but also point towards opportunities for new modes of adaptive governance. The article concludes by reflecting on the promise of developing an adaptive governance approach to peri-urban flooding to acknowledge the social and ecological complexities of climate change while opening up possibilities for emergent modes and innovative approaches of collaborative problem-solving.

Application of Risk Analysis in the Screening of Flood Disaster Hot Spots and Adaptation Strategies

In recent years, Taiwan has established a sound flood control foundation in terms of river management. Due to climate change and land development, surface runoff has increased. In addition, the functions of flood control engineering facilities have their limits. Surface runoff cannot be fully absorbed by rivers, and frequent floods still occur in some areas. According to the characteristics of water flowing along the terrain to low-lying land, the terrain features can be used to find out the hot areas prone to flooding and the appropriate location of flood storage space for improving flooding. On the basis of the natural terrain environment, the disaster risk framework is used to manage environmental complexity, and to carry out research on flood warning and governance decision-making systems, so that human beings can coexist with the uncertainty of flood risk. In this study, the Zhuoshuixi Basin was used as the sample area, the SCS-CN method was used to analyze the excess runoff, and the risk concept was used to establish a flood evaluation model. In addition, through the changes in land use, the SCS-CN method estimates the difference of potential maximum retention, quantifies the variation of excess rainfall in each watershed division, and uses the digital elevation model to calculate the depression site to analyze the relationship between the difference of potential maximum retention and the depression space of the watershed. The results show that the adaptation strategy for high-risk flooded areas should be strengthened, and areas with large water storage space and a small potential maximum retention difference can be the best location for offsite compensation.

Floods as agents of vitality: Reaffirming human-nature synergies

The policy response for flood governance should be based on the premise that floods in monsoon-dominated landscapes such as the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basin are inevitable.

Making Indian cities climate and water resilient

The article highlights flood risk and governance challenges in India. With reference to the recent Chennai floods, it elaborates on past mistakes and the way forward to improve the resilience of Indian cities to manage climate disasters.

Implementing resilience in flood risk management

Implementing resilience in flood risk management

Adaptive flood governance in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta: A policy innovation of the North Vam Nao scheme, An Giang Province

Conventional state policies for intensive agricultural production in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) prescribe the expansion of large-scale water engineering infrastructure. In the upper part of the VMD, compounding environmental challenges presented by climate change, hydropower development upstream, and localised development policies have added greater pressures to rural societies, demanding various governance approaches to deal with change. So far, considerable attention has been devoted to policy narratives of how the bureaucratic approach shapes flood management delta-wide, but little is known about the relevant shift towards adaptive governance at the local level. The analysis presented here is based on qualitative data gathered from fieldworks and desk reviews and argues that the North Vam Nao scheme is an exemplary case for policy transformation in the VMD. A hybrid governance paradigm that is characterised by the participatory and hierarchical approaches allows for the shared learning and interactions of knowledge vertically and horizontally among stakeholders. The study presents nuanced implications of the approach in incorporating both ‘integrative’ and ‘adaptive’ components into a long-term water governance strategy, which would serve as a two-pronged contribution to effectively manage environmental uncertainties facing the VMD. It also advocates for the legitimacy of the approach to be institutionalised and widely adopted across the Mekong floodplains and beyond.

Shifts in Spatial Plans for Flood Resilience and Climate Adaptation: Examining Planning Procedure and Planning Mandates

The paper examines the development of different spatial plans to address flood resilience in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, one of the most vulnerable cities to flooding and climate change. The analysis focuses on the differences in planning procedures and planning mandates (determined by different plans in authority) before and after the launch of the Sponge City Plan which calls for numerous spatial resilience measures to address the increasing flood risk. The analysis reveals that the introduction of the Sponge City Plan has changed the role of planning from onlooker to active participant in the arena of flood governance. In addition, new plans combine long-term strategic visions, soft principles, and strict regulations with an aim to promote concrete planning practice between multiple layers with a clear mandate. Despite these shifts, institutional and territorial challenges remain.

Urban flood risk mapping using data-driven geospatial techniques for a flood-prone case area in Iran

AbstractIn an effort to improve tools for effective flood risk assessment, we applied machine learning algorithms to predict flood-prone areas in Amol city (Iran), a site with recent floods (2017–2018). An ensemble approach was then implemented to predict hazard probabilities using the best machine learning algorithms (boosted regression tree, multivariate adaptive regression spline, generalized linear model, and generalized additive model) based on a receiver operator characteristic-area under the curve (ROC-AUC) assessment. The algorithms were all trained and tested on 92 randomly selected points, information from a flood inundation survey, and geospatial predictor variables (precipitation, land use, elevation, slope percent, curve number, distance to river, distance to channel, and depth to groundwater). The ensemble model had 0.925 and 0.892 accuracy for training and testing data, respectively. We then created a vulnerability map from data on building density, building age, population density, and socio-economic conditions and assessed risk as a product of hazard and vulnerability. The results indicated that distance to channel, land use, and runoff generation were the most important factors associated with flood hazard, while population density and building density were the most important factors determining vulnerability. Areas of highest and lowest flood risks were identified, leading to recommendations on where to implement flood risk reduction measures to guide flood governance in Amol city.

Flood governance for resilience in cities: The historical policy transformations in Dakar’s suburbs

Flooding disasters in urban and suburban Dakar have been prioritised in various policy actions over the last two decades. Our research aimed to generate a historical overview of the progressive transformations of flood governance in Dakar. We found that flood governance policies have gone through three main phases, each representing a paradigm shift: the ‘emergency-relief’ phase, the ‘water-pull-out’ phase, and the ‘live-with-water’ phase. We argue that the second phase, which began in 2012, was supported by an engineering approach, where fresh water was literally pulled out using large-scale drainage infrastructure. This can be considered the ultimate stage of the conquest of urbanisation over nature. The resulting situation was a clear reduction in flood exposure, giving rise to smaller disasters. A new form of land competition also developed in the areas that were drained of water. These areas required the inclusion of local stakeholders into flood management processes. Although both the government and international partners have invested efforts in trying to coordinate flood management, the distribution of competences across several ministries and a lack of cooperation is provoking a “vertically divided authority”, leading to overlapping mandates and competition among state and non-state agencies. From 2014 onwards, what we called the ‘live-with-water’ phase supported the greater inclusion of local stakeholders and a change in articulation, which tried to consider water not as a threat but as a resource. The conclusion of this paper calls for the development of locally centred flood management bodies (including grass-root organisations and municipalities) as well as a more elaborate and complex articulation of the physical and institutional temporalities and scales of flood management.

Assembling the 2011 Thailand floods: Protecting farmers and inundating high-value industrial estates in a fragmented hydro-social territory

A number of political ecologists have argued that if flooding arises and choices have to be made in terms of protection and sacrifice, state actors will protect economically-valuable assets of the elite while sacrificing assets and lives of the masses. However, during the 2011 floods in Thailand, one of the costliest disasters ever, the opposite occurred in the Chao Phraya River Basin: state actors protected farmland of the rural masses and their actions significantly contributed to the flooding of the high-value industrial estates of the elite in Central Thailand. I argue that to better explain what happened we should conceive of floods as assemblages, both human and non-human, as well as examine the development of the hydro-social territory in which flooding occurs. My analysis takes into account several factors which affected vulnerability to the floods: the three-dimensional geography of the basin, water’s unruliness, the history of infrastructure development, the politics of scale, and state fragmentation. To show the importance of these variables, I analyse the history of water infrastructure and governance in the Chao Phraya River Basin, showing how changes in Thailand’s political economy and the configuration of institutions made it possible for state actors to protect farmers. Next, I show how state actions in 2011 enabled farmers to be protected and contributed to the flooding of the industrial estates. My findings suggest that approaches to flooding should move beyond mere analyses of state power and socioeconomic status and take more fully into account the embedded nature of the socio-political and physical geographies shaping flood governance.