Resilience
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Abstract
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, DOI: 10.1111/jfr3.12670