Resilience

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

As the number of COVID19 cases is increasing again in Europe and other areas, the interest in flood risk management is declining. The public and politicians are occupied by more urgent issues, such as health, income, and employment. Especially in countries where the last flood occurred long ago, like the Netherlands, the issue of flood risk management may be moved down on the list of priorities. However, it remains important to continue improving the knowledge on assessing flood risks and developing and evaluating flood risk management strategies. If not, risks may increase, and opportunities for measures may be lost. Climate change will increase flood risks if no counteractions are taken (Haasnoot et al., 2020). Ice sheets are melting faster than anticipated, increasing coastal flood hazards; extreme weather events, and river floods may occur more frequently and become more severe. This may require drastic changes in our flood risk management strategies in the long term. Such changes need time and require debate among scientists, especially policymakers and society. They may also become increasingly difficult by today's decisions, which lock-in our current strategy. Much money is spent on flood risk management, not only after flood events on repair and recovery but also for flood protection. To make sure this money is spent wisely and to prevent regret from having made the wrong decisions, improved flood risk analyses and new approaches to flood risk management are needed. The COVID19 crisis may teach us things about crisis management that may also be useful for flood risk management. Although floods are very different from pandemics, important lessons can be learned, for example, on what is vital and must continue functioning (e.g., schools, health care), on how experts and politicians should or could best work together (sharing responsibilities), on the need of involving all relevant stakeholders when taking decisions, and on communication. The crisis reveals societies' abilities to join forces and take care of each other, as well as their innovative capacities, which results in workable alternatives for shortages in supplies, increased hospital capacity, and adapted procedures that allow opening of buildings and participating in activities in a safer way. These contribute to society's resilience to cope with the pandemic and will also contribute to its recovery in the future. Societal resilience is also crucial in flood risk management. Resilience has been applied to flood risk management for about two decades already (Vis et al., 2003; De Bruijn, 2004). Recently, its popularity has become overwhelming, especially because it has been adopted by three important global post-2015 agendas: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (IPCC, 2012). Furthermore, resilience is promoted by scientific communities (especially The Resilience Society, but also by the International Conference on Flood Management [ICFM7], who made it the leading concept in 2017) and picked up by many regional and national authorities (e.g., the ADB and EU (ADB, 2014; EU, 2013), the 100 Resilience City programme of the Rockefeller foundation (ARUP, 2014), and the Netherlands' Delta Program (MOIE, 2015). There is thus a broadly shared vision that enhancing resilience is needed. However, there is no common understanding on what precisely implies enhancing resilience. Resilience has been defined in different ways, varying from very narrow as “the ability to recover from a response to disturbance such as a flooding” to very broad as: “the ability to cope with disturbances and changes by avoiding or minimizing impacts and having the ability to learn and adapt in order to remain resilient into the future”. Lately, it appears to have become an umbrella concept, covering almost everything that was previously covered by “sustainability” and including adaptation (adaptive management) and transformation (DHS, 2008). Although the resilience concept has been used in many ways, this does not mean it is only a buzzword. As the popularity of the word already shows it covers something that was felt to be missing before. In flood risk management, decisions are often based on risk analysis. These risk analyses could, in theory, include potential impacts that are relevant to society. However, they are often simplified and focused on direct impacts corresponding with maximum flood depths with a certain probability of exceedance. Sometimes, business interruption of flooded companies and fatality risk are also included, but all other indirect and non-monetary impacts are generally excluded. As the analyses focus on maximum water depths only and not on the whole chain of events leading to those water depths, measures which do not directly affect that water depth cannot be easily considered. Specifically, measures aiming to increase warning time, improve effective emergency response, enhance recovery, or build differently or, elsewhere, reduce future risk increase are often not considered. Such a limited application of risk analysis may lead to suboptimal choices of measures. Moreover, science favours presenting integrated risk numbers, whereas laypeople do not perceive risk from small-probability catastrophes as similar to risk linked to frequent small-impact events. The very extreme events may seem irrelevant for the total risk, but they may be considered relevant by decision-makers if their potential effects would be shown to them. Although the insurance industry considers the entire flood loss curve, most flood risk analyses give only a single risk number. This number does not reveal deep uncertainties and potential surprises that may occur and their effects (Merz et al., 2015). Finally, flood risk management is still often the responsibility of water authorities, while a more comprehensive and tailored approach towards society would require the engagement of citizens, industries, critical infrastructure operators, and local governments. They are the ones that should benefit from improved flood risk management and, therefore, should be engaged, and they could contribute, although they may not have the full picture. As learned from the COVID19 crisis, to cope with a hazard, engagement of all actors is needed. Adopting resilience means being willing to address more aspects than usually addressed in flood risk analyses and developing comprehensive strategies that enable societies to cope with hazards of all magnitudes. Resilience analysis involves analysing the response of systems to extreme events (e.g., of cities, countries or societies, also including flood management infrastructure such as embankments or barriers), a response that cannot be expressed “only” by euros per year but should reveal the response to both frequent and very rare events, the effect on economy, well-being, and all that matters to society during the event, not only in its aftermath and during recovery but also in the long term. Furthermore, adopting resilience as a guiding principle for the design of future strategies may lead to a different starting point: The hazardous events are not considered central but the society and its most important characteristics and developments. What putting resilience into the practice of flood risk management means is still to be decisively established. Research on this is intensifying but still struggles making things practical. The adoption of a number of guiding principles may be of help in this regard (De Bruijn et al., 2017). Principles such as “applying a systems approach” (vs. local optimization) (Vorogushyn et al., 2018), “also consider beyond-design events and how to cope with such events”, “assess what must remain functioning” instead of only what damage is expected, “assess the recovery capacity” of a society, and identify trends and developments that may affect or offer opportunities to strengthen “future resilience” are mentioned. To really put these into practice, better indicators, examples, tools methods, and evaluation criteria are needed. Equity (in space, between groups, and between generations) may, next to cost–benefit ratios and effects on nature, be included more often, as covered by the term inclusive green growth. A focus on resilience thus changes our mindset from quantification of risk to understanding system behaviour and societal needs under a full range of possible events and prolonged time scales. This requires elaborating existing approaches and developing new approaches aimed at enabling societies to cope with flood hazards now and in the future.