Confronting complexity

Abstract

The analysis of flood risks gives us an overview of the flood hazards, the elements at risk, and their vulnerability within a certain region, namely in floodplains. In these landscape elements, the determinants of risk-hazard, exposure, and vulnerability-overlap spatially. Flood risk analysis synthesises the risk factors and thus provides an important basis for decision-making in managing risks. In many cases, today's decisions set the framework for future flood risks for quite a long time, at least for the lifetime of flood protection measures. At the same time, many of our problems in flood risk management result from unintended consequences of past solutions. These legacy effects sometimes narrow the degree of freedom for today's problem-solving. Environmental and societal conditions that had shaped decisions in the past markedly changed since then, and will do so in the future. Thus, flood risks are far away from being static but are dynamically evolving with the changing determinants of flood risks.Flood hazards might be altered by the effects of climatic changes, by the effects of environmental changes on catchment runoffs, or by changes in the river morphology. River systems and their floodplains adapt to their environmental boundary conditions and can thus be considered as complex adaptive systems (Thoms & Sheldon, 2019). Complexity increases further if we take human behaviour and adaptation into account. Exposure to flood hazards will follow future economic growth, and vulnerability will evolve along with changes in societal values, risk awareness, and technology. The processes and forces that shape the evolution of flood risks thus are numerous, diverse, and work at different scales. They are interdependent, influence each other, coevolve, balance each other out, or amplify each other. Feedback processes can self-reinforce or dampen the effects of climatic changes on flood risks. Out of these interactions, sometimes new patterns or a change in the system behaviour may emerge at a higher order level or at another scale (Neal et al., 2011). Flood events sometimes foster a paradigm shift in flood risk management practice (Johnson et al., 2005).Complexity is also encountered in flood risk management practice. Professionals involved in participatory

Flood risk research for improving flood risk outcomes

“…viewpoints of my esteemed colleagues, Burrell Montz and Andrea Zischg in their recent editorials (Montz, 2021;Zischg, 2022) about the need to confront complexity in flood risk management research and consider the translation of studies to assist in their adoption into practice. Dewa et al (2023) in their contribution to this Issue do just this and present a multidimensional framework for characterising, measuring and understanding community flood resilience in rural Malawi and integrate physical and socio-demographic factors.…”