A systematic review of natural flood management modelling: Approaches, limitations, and potential solutions

Abstract

The Pitt Review of the 2007 summer floods in the UK, published in 2008, commended the potential of natural flood management (NFM) for reducing flood risk. NFM is a nature‐based approach that has since gained substantial interest from both practitioners and academics. The review further highlighted the need for catchment‐based flood management (CBFM) to enhance resilience to flooding and climate change by incorporating NFM and wider nature‐based solutions into hard flood protection systems. Such integrated approaches are considered to be more sustainable and adaptable than the traditional hard‐engineered measures. More recently, the European Commission's European Green Deal also highlighted the need for greater use of nature‐based solutions including NFM for managing flood risk. Whilst there have been many attempts to quantify the effects of NFM through hydraulic and hydrological modelling, there is still no systematic review conducted for these modelling works. This review aims to summarise the current NFM modelling approaches, as well as discussing their key limitations related to data, model methods, and real‐world applications. This paper then goes further to highlight potential solutions to some of these challenges and provides guidance to assist modellers to improve future modelling and data collection process.

Detection of decadal time‐series changes in flow hydrology in eastern Australia: Considerations for river recovery and flood management

“…Croke et al, 2017). This can be used to identify reaches or sub-catchments for targeted on-ground actions, which is essential for establishing a systematic and integrated NFM framework (Gourevitch et al, 2020;Hill et al, 2023). The data could also be used to better calibrate and validate flood models for monitoring, risk assessment and prediction (Arash & Yasi, 2022;Merwade et al, 2008).…”

Monitoring Solutions for Remote Locations: A Data Gathering Approach for Remote Nature-Based Solution Sites

“…These alternatives are not only cost-effective but also allow for more frequent updates [24,25]. Regarding NbS-specific challenges, small features like LWBs are frequently excluded from national LiDAR datasets due to their width being smaller than the resolution of available national LiDAR, or because sites were constructed after the LiDAR data collection was performed [26,27]. Furthermore, current funding landscapes in many countries do not allocate budgets for large-scale monitoring of NbS interventions, primarily due to governmental financing structures 1 [28], and the perception of NbS as a low-cost solution [29].…”

Assessing Tradeoffs and Synergies between Land Use Land Cover Change and Ecosystem Services in River Ecosystem Using InVEST Model

“…Few studies have systematically quanti ed the ecosystem service potential of whole river ecosystems. A number have targeted only single services, such as nitrogen retention (Basak et al, 2021;Burgin et al, 2013;Vermaat et al, 2016); water quality (Gilvear et al, 2019;Keele et al, 2019;Stammel et al, 2021); water provision (Notter et al, 2012) and ood regulation (Asbjornsen et al, 2022;Hill et al, 2023;Liu et al, 2021). There remains a paucity of tools to assess and quantify the ecosystem services generated by often complex river reaches and stream networks (Palmer & Ruhi, 2019).…”