Fair strategies to tackle unfair risks? Justice considerations within flood risk management

Moving from total risk to community-based risk trajectories increases transparency and equity in flood risk mitigation planning along urban rivers

“…While a valuable starting point, the common focus on distributional inequities has been criticized as insufficient, calling for more attention to how patterns of inequity are produced and sustained [55][56][57]. There is no simple answer to this systemic dimension of inequitable flood-risk management, but one theme that has proven to be productive in guiding planning towards greater equity is a dual focus on distributive and procedural inequities [58]. Here, we combine these two vantage points, to identify an actionable and transferable way forward that relies equally on an intentionally designed multi-tier engagement model and a flood model developed specifically to quantify and thereby elevate a community concern that could not be substantiated in the standard flood modeling framework traditionally used in planning.…”

“…Once we had validated the concerns expressed by the City of East Palo Alto, we developed a strategic partnership with the SFCJPA to address this issue. Our model designed as a probabilistic wrapper of flood drivers inputted into the HEC-RAS model already used by SFCJPA and other project partners in planning, was critical for the success of this partnership, since the standard HEC-RAS model still provided a common basis to which our extensions added the dimension of spatial and temporal variability of risk [58,61,62]. Figure 5 shows the metric that we have found most useful in communicating our concerns to decision-making agencies like SFCJPA.…”