Flood resilience: consolidating knowledge between and within critical infrastructure sectors

Abstract

Flood resilience has been rising up the political, economic and social agendas. Taking an integrated systems approach, using the right design guidance and tools and ensuring that education is in place for all stakeholders are three themes which are intrinsically linked to delivering flood resilience. This paper reviews these themes across the academic research, policy landscape and practitioner approaches, drawing conclusions on the way forward to increase our societies resilience to floods. The term 'flood resilience' is being increasingly used, however, it remains to be clearly defined and implemented. The UK, USA and Australia are leading the way in considering what flood resilience really means, but our review has found few examples of action underpinned by an understanding of systems and complexity. This review investigates how performance objectives & indicators are currently interpreted in guidance documents. It provides an in-depth exploration of the methods, that although developed through European and US expertise, can be used for worldwide application. Our analysis highlights that resilience is often embedded in engineering education and frequently linked to risk. This may however, mask the importance of resilience and where it differs from risk. With £2.6 billion to be spent in the UK over the next 6 years on strengthening the country's flood and coastal defences, this is the opportunity to rethink resilience from a systems approach, and embed that learning into education and professional development of engineers. Our conclusions indicate how consolidating flood resilience knowledge between and within critical infrastructure sectors is the way forward to deliver flood resilience engineering.

Towards Resilient Vital Infrastructure Systems: Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Research Agenda

“…A cognitive approach helps to determine how system controllers think, perceive, behave and decide at the time of failure or disruption. This approach provides a better insight to learn from the previous failures (fifth ability in Figure 4), supporting the systems engineers to be aware of what/why failures have occurred, so that they can control or avoid future similar failures (Pearson et al, 2018).…”

“…The question is whether the focus should be on short term and rapidly occurring disasters (hurricanes), or more on gradual changes such as climate change-induced hazards (Wardekker et al, 2010;Meerow et al, 2016). However, Pearson et al (2018) pointed out that designing infrastructures within the resilience thinking needs to evolve faster than the actual demand for services, since the timescale of the system realisation is comparable with changes of environmental scenarios and, therefore, does not allow for quick response. There is also an issue of determining the spatial boundary, while incorporating the resilience concept in designing infrastructure systems.…”

“…In order to improve infrastructure resilience, a whole system view is required which includes the physical assets, the users and stakeholders (Pearson et al, 2018). Therefore, there should be a holistic approach focusing on the ways that the system's constituent parts interrelate and work over time within larger systems.…”

“…In doing so, team reflection helps to make resilience-related knowledge explicit (Siegel and Schraagen, 2017a), and to better learn from the previous events. Resilience knowledge-sharing, education and guidance among the users and stakeholders are the foundation for designing, operating and functioning of the resilient infrastructure such as flood resilient integrated systems (Pearson et al, 2018).…”

Interoperability: A conceptual framework to bridge the gap between multifunctional and multisystem urban flood management

“…Urban flood resilience (UFR) is the term commonly used to refer to the whole urban system (i.e., from physical structures to people) and its capacity to cope with flooding, specifically, to maintain significant levels of efficiency in its social, economic, environmental, and physical functions during and after flood events (Balsells et al, 2015;Cousins et al, 2017;Hammond, Chen, Djordjevi c, Butler, & Mark, 2015;OECD, 2014;Parsons et al, 2018;Staddon et al, 2018). An advantage of (re)orienting urban flood management through the concept of resilience (as opposed to flood mitigation only), is that it encourages creative thinking and flexible adaptation strategies focussing on dynamic, systemic, and integrated approaches (Balsells et al, 2015).…”