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Operationalizing urban resilience to floods in embanked territories – Application in Avignon, Provence Alpes Côte d’azur region
Abstract
Over-urbanization coupled with a climate change has led to an increase in urban floods, both in frequency and intensity. Faced with growing uncertainties, managers are struggling to find appropriate risk management strategies. Alongside traditional risk management strategies, the concept of Urban Resilience is embedded in political discourses, international and local strategies. However, this concept remains still very abstract for a lot of actors, a buzzword difficult to operationalize. The objective of this work is to concretize urban resilience to floods by proposing a spatial decision support tool co-built with urban managers. The proposed methodology is a holistic approach integrating three indicators of resilience applied to the Avignon case study (Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur Region).
... While there is a growing attention to building resilience to flood risk, scholars have raised concerns over the vagueness and lack of clarity in definitions and interpretations of resilience [4][5][6][7]. Lack of an explicit operational interpretation hampers its application [8], and practitioners' varied interpretations shape different resilience discourses [9]. This conceptual vagueness and ambiguous operational interpretation can hinder governments and other organizations from designing clear-cut measures to make urban Scholars have noted that a system's resilience depends critically on its adaptive capacity [40]. ...
... The city's FRM engages the public through public organizations, LPOs, consisting of voluntary members, such as the district-level local autonomous disaster prevention organizations (LADPOs), 3 and the sub-district level local neighborhood representatives (LNRs). 4 LADPOs are designed by the MOIS, and city governments implement LADPOs in accordance with regulations in the Countermeasures Against Natural Disasters Act. The SMG encourages district offices to organize their own LADPOs. ...
... The group is called Ji-yeok-ja-yool-bang-jae-dan in Korean.4 The representatives are called Tong-jang and Ban-jang. ...
Building resilience has been a critical agenda for disaster risk management, but how to build and what to build tend to remain abstract. Our analysis offers insights on practices deployed by the Seoul Metropolitan Government to increase the city's resilience to floods. By specifically choosing two districts in the city, we interviewed key informants involved in flood risk management (FRM) and reviewed documents on FRM at the city and local levels. We manually coded the qualitative data by matching the content with 22 institutional adaptive capacity criteria developed by Gupta and colleagues. We found that the deployment of formal local public organizations, supported by South Korea's city and local level institutional arrangements, augmented human resources and enhanced flood resilience through constructive redundancy in flood risk monitoring and neighborhood-level outreach to community members. We also found that long-term (e.g., 10- year) risk management plans may possibly become a barrier to exploratory and reflexive social learning processes (i.e., double-loop learning), unless there is an effort to regularly examine and reframe risk in the plans. Seoul can further enhance resilience to floods by increasing citizens' abilities to act (i.e., strengthening their capacity for autonomous actions); this can most effectively be done by providing individuals with plans and detailed scripts for action in the face of flood risk.
... Capacities can be both tangible (urban networks, supply of vital resources, etc.) and intangible (knowledge of risk, economic dynamics, institutional framework, etc.)." focused on the necessary evolution of risk management strategies through the integration of resilience into the planning process [71]. Finally, the cultural dimension of risk management can also be seen as a barrier [59] to the implementation of the concept of resilience [72]. At the level of local actors [73][74][75][76][77], it can be expressed through the culture of risk. ...
... These different indicator models demonstrate the multitude of possible methodological choices for developing them. Some work at the national scale [83][84][85][86] others at the urban scale ( [7,72,87]. The complexity of defining the concept of resilience also leads to diverse and varied choices regarding the number of indicators constructed, some exceeding 10 indicators [84,85,87], others focusing on a more limited number [7,72,83,86,88]. ...
... Some work at the national scale [83][84][85][86] others at the urban scale ( [7,72,87]. The complexity of defining the concept of resilience also leads to diverse and varied choices regarding the number of indicators constructed, some exceeding 10 indicators [84,85,87], others focusing on a more limited number [7,72,83,86,88]. This multitude can lead to an overload of information, and therefore to a blurring of the knowledge acquired. ...
This paper presents a review of existing strategies and tools aiming at facilitating the operationalization of the concept of resilience into built environments. In a context of climate change, increased risks in urban areas and growing uncertainties, urban managers are forced to innovate in order to design appropriate new risk management strategies. Among these strategies, making cities resilient has become an imperative. However, resilience remains complex to integrate into the practices of urban planners and territorial actors. Its multitude of definitions and approaches has contributed to its abstraction and lack of operationalization. This review highlights the multitude of approaches and methodologies to address the bias of the lack of integration of the concept of resilience in climate risk management. The limit is the multiplication of these strategies which lead to conceptual vagueness and a lack of tangible application at the level of local actors. The challenge would then be to design a toolbox to concentrate the various existing tools, conceptual models and decision support systems in order to facilitate the autonomy and responsibility of local stakeholders in integrating the concept of resilience into risk management strategies.
... Winter is drier with cold, continental winds. Flash floods are common in the region (e.g., Vinet 2008a, b;Vinet et al. 2012;Heinzlef et al. 2019), with a significant number of fatal historical events taking place since the creation of the CatNat national solidarity scheme in 1982. Some notable extreme flooding events that have provoked loss of life, as well as significant material costs, include the Vaison-la-Romaine floods (September 1992), the Draguignan floods (June 2010), and the most recent Côte d'Azur floods (October 2015). ...
... In the last 10 years, several PACA municipalities have attempted to emphasize resilience in their urban planning in response to repeated flooding (Heinzlef et al. 2019). For example, Avignon is applying a holistic methodology for resilience to floods with social (e.g., education, insurance), technical (e.g., engineering, transport network), and urban (e.g., economical dynamics, environment) characteristics. ...
... For example, despite repeated flooding (2015,2019,2020) in the Riou de l'Argentière drainage basin, the local government has not focused on improving resilience or allocated any funding to the relocation of constantly damaged elements. In contrast, as Heinzlef et al. (2019) indicate, the city authorities in Avignon have demanded increased resilience planning for frequently flooded areas and placed the city under a pilot study. Arnaud-Fassetta et al. (2009) emphasize that, for every drainage basin, flood-intense periods over past centuries and their characteristics must be studied and compared to recent decades to observe abnormalities and explanations for current disasters. ...
France experiences catastrophic floods on a yearly basis, with significant societal impacts. In this study, we use multiple sources (insurance datasets, scientific articles, satellite data, and grey literature) to (1) analyze modern flood disasters in the PACA Region; (2) discuss the efficiency of French public policy instruments; (3) perform a SWOT analysis of French flood risk governance (FRG); and (4) suggest improvements to the FRG framework. Despite persistent government efforts, the impacts of flood events in the region have not lessened over time. Identical losses in the same locations are observed after repeated catastrophic events. Relative exposure to flooding has increased in France, apparently due to intense urbanization of flood-prone land. We suggest that the French FRG could benefit from the following improvements: (1) regular updates of risk prevention plans and tools; (2) the adoption of a build back better logic; (3) taking undeclared damages into account in flood risk models; (4) better communication between the actors at the different steps of each cycle (preparation, control, organization, etc.); (5) better communication between those responsible for risk prevention, emergency management, and disaster recovery; (6) an approach that extends the risk analysis outside the borders of the drainage basin; and (7) increased participation in FRG from local populations.
... Some studies have been carried out to facilitate its operationalization. These researches are principally divided into two approaches, a technical-functional approach [22,27,28] and a more organizational approach [29][30][31][32]. However, this concept is still facing operational limitations, which restricts its integration into local risk management strategies [33,34]. ...
... There are a multitude of approaches to operationalizing territorial resilience, resulting from years of research in the field of risk management, but they are too often used separately. The challenge of this study consists in assembling and adapting three methods, already applied in European cities [28,29,31], in order to design indicators for measuring and evaluating territorial resilience in French Polynesia. ...
... However, this perspective does not provide a comprehensive approach to the resilience of a territory that must take into account other components of the territory, other than technical. This is why this methodology is complemented with an approach that takes into account the social and urban components of a territory [31]. ...
In the context of climate change and increasing urbanization, Small Island Developing States are increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters. In response to urbanization in at risk areas, the concept of territorial resilience has potential as an approach to urban flood issues. The objective of this research is to develop a spatial decision support tool based on a collaborative assessment method of territorial resilience. The proposed methodology consists of: the adaptation to the French Polynesian context, three existing resilience assessment methods applied to a case study in the Punaruu Valley’s (Punaauia, French Polynesia) and the use of geovisualization techniques: use of GIS for data processing and analysis, visualization, mapping and model processing. This methodology integrates the technical, urban and social components of the territory, while highlighting the various levers available to improve territorial resilience and facilitate its understanding through collaborative work efforts and the use of a visual tool. The results demonstrate the reproducibility of these methods for assessing resilience in French Polynesia. They underline the potential of a collaborative approach to highlight critical infrastructures and generate possible decision support to improve the territory’s ability to function despite a disruption and the ability to rebuild following this disruption.
... This may be due to a number of factors, such as existing knowledge and skills, time pressure, and organizational culture. Finally, Heinzlef et al. (2019) and colleagues tackle the concept of urban resilience and argue, through an application in France, that a co-produced set of indicators is a robust way to measure urban resilience against floods in embanked regions. ...
... The use of statistical information by professionals in risk governance Heinzlef et al. (2019) Research Urban resilience indicators Hanea and Nane (2019) Research Score measuring the level of calibration of experts' assessment of probabilities Meng et al. (2019) Research Framing adversarial risks Bucelli et al. (2020) System engineering for subsea spill risk management ...
... The concept of resilience appeared in the 2000s in the field of risk management [25]. Resilience, a multidisciplinary concept, is defined (in the context of risk management) as the capacity of a system to adapt to disruptions, limit their negative impacts and recover a balance following the shock(s) [26]. The associated notions are the capacities for learning [27][28][29], adaptation [30], rebound, innovation, flexibility, evolution and anticipa-tion [18,31]. ...
... To overcome this operational limitation, numerous studies [33,40,41], models [42,43] and indicators [26,[44][45][46][47] have been developed. However, the problem is precisely the multitude of these studies and models, thus accentuating the vagueness surrounding the operationalization of the concept of resilience. ...
Climate change has an ever-increasing impact on island territories. Whether it is due to rising sea levels or the increase in recurrence and intensity of extreme events, island territories are increasingly vulnerable. These impacts are expected to affect marine and terrestrial biodiversity, human occupation (infrastructure) and other activities such as agriculture and tourism, the two economic pillars of French Polynesia. While the current and future impacts of climate change on island territories are generally accepted, data acquisition, modeling, and projections of climate change are more complex to obtain and limitedly cover the island territories of the Pacific region. This article aims to develop methodologies for the acquisition and exploitation of data on current and future climate risks and their impacts in French Polynesia. This work of acquisition and valorization is part of a research project for the development of an observatory of resilience to climate risks in the perspective of building a spatial decision support system.
... The second type of investigated approach is based on a set of indicators, widely developed in various forms and applied to the city of Avignon by Charlotte Heinzlef (Heinzlef, Becue and Serre, 2019). The indicators selected in this work was based on several works, including the BRIC method (Cutter et al., 2008). ...
... Example of a resilience indicator with an inclusive vision(Heinzlef, 2019) ...
... This may be due to a number of factors, such as existing knowledge and skills, time pressure, and organizational culture. Finally, Heinzlef et al. (2019) and colleagues tackle the concept of urban resilience and argue, through an application in France, that a co-produced set of indicators is a robust way to measure urban resilience against floods in embanked regions. ...
... The use of statistical information by professionals in risk governance Heinzlef et al. (2019) Research Urban resilience indicators Hanea and Nane (2019) Research Score measuring the level of calibration of experts' assessment of probabilities Meng et al. (2019) Research Framing adversarial risks Bucelli et al. (2020) System engineering for subsea spill risk management ...
... These groupings provide organisation for the flood resilience definitions, with many encompassing more than one grouping (i.e. Heinzlef et al. (2019); Hochrainer-Stigler et al (2020); Slavíková, Hartmann, and Thaler, (2021)). Whilst there is evident of diversification of flood resilience definitions over time, they appear to use synonymous language (Fig. 3), yet there is very few repeated throughout the review. ...
Flooding is one of the most complicated and prolific natural hazards that communities face. Added to this, more people will be affected by this hazard than any other in the future. Within recent years, there has been a notable shift in flood risk management from risk-based approaches to resilience-based. Considered a novel and necessary approach, yet no single definition of flood resilience exists. Leading to confusion surrounding the applicability of the concept. A systematic review of flood resilience definitions was hence conducted, covering a 5-year period from 2017 to 2021, resulting in 65 papers, supplemented by a narrative review (to include papers outside of the scope of the study), which added a further 11 papers. Results indicated that whilst there is no singular definition for flood resilience, there are similarities between definitions through the use of synonymous language. Whilst there is evidence of these definitions evolving over time, there is still confusion over the definition. Further research is required to further comprehend the definitions of resilience, helping to develop the use of resilience within flood sciences and corresponding flood risk management practices.
... These systems encompass a vast array of components, including stormwater collection networks, drainage canals, retention basins, and flood control infrastructure [2], [3]. Their primary mission is the efficient management and control of stormwater runoff, guiding it away from populated areas [10], [36]. In doing so, they serve as the first line of defense against localized flooding, thus preserving public health and safeguarding both property and critical urban infrastructure (Norizan et al., 2023). ...
This study investigates global urban challenges, with a specific focus on Gbarnga City, Liberia. The primary concern revolves around effective flood management, exacerbated by rapid urbanization, population growth, and climate change. The objective of this study was to evaluate the design and infrastructure of the open urban drainage canal system in Gbarnga City. Open drainage canals were sampled from three shapes: triangular (1.60 km, with an average depth of 33 cm and 97 cm width), rectangular (1.23 km, with an average depth of 41 cm and 136 cm width), and trapezoidal (1.03 km, with an average depth of 26 cm and 97 cm width). The findings reveal that nearly 90% of Gbarnga's open drainage canal systems suffer from inadequate construction, making them highly vulnerable to flooding, as evidenced by significant flood-related damages in 2020. Technical factors negatively impact a substantial portion of open drainage canals, with maintenance-related issues ranging from improper garbage disposal to sediment deposition and overgrown vegetation. Triangular canals are the most affected (94%), followed by rectangular (84%), with trapezoidal canals experiencing the lowest impact (39%). In conclusion, this study highlights the critical role of urban drainage systems in flood mitigation, emphasizing the need for comprehensive solutions in rapidly urbanizing cities like Gbarnga. The study recommends stringent construction standards, maintenance programs, community engagement, professional training, and sustainable drainage techniques to enhance the sustainability and safety of Gbarnga's urban drainage systems.
... Estudos científicos sobre a resiliência urbana vêm se expandindo nas últimas décadas, logo, torna-se necessário o conhecimento específico dos possíveis moduladores da resiliência urbana nas diversas escalas territoriais -global, regional e local (COLLOFF et al., 2017;HEINZLEF et al., 2019;LUDIN et al., 2018;SERRE e HEINZLEF, 2018;TYLER e MOENCH, 2012). Esse tema está principalmente atrelado a adaptação da sociedade às mudanças do clima, requerido à grande ocorrência de eventos extremos, sobretudo nas taxas de precipitação, que afetam diretamente a coletividade humana (TIBÚRCIO e CORRÊA, 2012;SANTOS et al., 2017). ...
Com o aumento da ocorrência de eventos extremos no meio urbano, muitos instrumentos estão surgindo a fim de monitorar as metas e ações pela busca de cidades mais preparadas e resilientes. Neste contexto, é importante o desenvolvimento de pesquisas que relacionam metodologias visando mensurar a resiliência urbana a nível municipal, com enfoque nos componentes climáticos e sociais, em caráter interdisciplinar. A presente pesquisa teve como objetivo de buscar por indicadores multissetoriais com a finalidade de auxiliar os gestores locais na busca da resiliência da cidade. Neste estudo adaptou-se o Índice de Resiliência da Cidade-IRC para ser utilizado na cidade de Belém-PA, Zona Costeira da Amazônia. Como resultado o IRC foi classificado como “Moderado”. Chama-se atenção especial para a falta de dados de qualidade ambiental, evidenciando assim a necessidade e urgência de investimentos no monitoramento de variáveis ambientais e na construção de séries temporais de dados. Nesse sistema não foram incorporados indicadores interessantes para a qualidade do ambiente natural, justamente por conta da carência dessas informações. E embora esta ferramenta encoraje as partes interessadas, há a necessidade do fortalecimento institucional e político da cidade para lidar com a resiliência como um desafio integral.
... These strategies include the implementation of the Build Back Better concept, the development of climate resilience through nature-based solutions such as the creation of additional urban green spaces for flood protection, the mapping of flood vulnerability, the integration of flood risk assessment and spatial planning for disaster management, the creation of resilience master plans, and the use of flood risk data (Afriyanie et al., 2020;Calliari et al., 2022;Membele et al., 2022;Esmaiel et al., 2022). Other strategies have also been employed including the utilisation of land use scenario simulation to augment spatial decision support with urban managers, which has been identified as a viable strategy by scholars such as Zhao et al. (2023) and Heinzlef et al. (2019). ...
... Son objectif est de donner des indications ou décrire un phénomène, une situation, un environnement, un processus. Plusieurs méthodologies se sont appuyées sur les indicateurs comme outil d'opérationnalisation du concept de résilience(Heinzlef et al., 2019). ...
This work focuses on the analysis of part of
the urban technical networks of the city of
Boussaâda, based on the premise that these
networks are a necessary prerequisite for the
analysis of urban resilience to flooding. This
work aims to develop a methodology by
adopting a global approach to analyze urban
resilience and to develop tools to assess the
resilience of precarious neighborhoods to the
risk of flooding, focusing on the one hand on
the analysis of the particularity of the resilience
capacities (Absorb, Recover) of these
networks, on the other hand on the analysis of
the interdependencies between the multiple
actors responsible for flood risk management.
The results of this work constitute a decision
support tool in the field of evaluation of urban
resilience and flood risk management in the
city of Boussaâda.
... Thus, customizing plans based on the local context becomes necessary to increase SC resilience. Studies related to climate change (Heinzlef et al., 2019;Langholtz et al., 2014) recommend strategies to mitigate disruptions early. ...
Purpose
This systematic literature review analyzes the academic literature to understand SC risk and resilience across different organizational sizes and industries. The academic literature has well discussed the causes of supply chain (SC) risk events, the impact of SC disruptions, and associated plans for SC resilience. However, the literature remains fragmented on the role of two fundamental elements in achieving SC resilience: the firm's size and the firm's industry as firms' contingent factors. Therefore, it is important to investigate and highlight SC resilience differences by size and industry type to establish more resilient firms.
Design/methodology/approach
Building upon the contingent resource-based view of the firm, the authors posit that organizational factors such as size and industry sector have important roles in developing organizational resilience capabilities. This systematic literature review and analysis is based on the structural and systematic analysis of high-ranked peer-reviewed journal papers from January 2000 to June 2021 collected through three global scientific databases (i.e. ProQuest, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar) using relevant keywords.
Findings
This systematic literature review of 230 high-quality articles shows that SC risk events can be categorized into demand, supply, organizational, operational, environmental, and network/control risk events. This study suggests that the SC resilience plans developed by startups, small and mdium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and large organizations are not necessarily the same as those of large enterprises. While collaboration and networking and risk management are the most crucial resilience capabilities for all firms, applying lean and quality management principles and utilizing information technology are more crucial for SMEs. For large firms, knowledge management and contingency planning are more important.
Originality/value
This study provides a comprehensive review of the literature on SC resilience plans across different organizational sizes and industries, offering new insights into the nature and dynamics of startups', SMEs', and large enterprises' SC resilience in different industries. The study highlights the need for further investigation of SC risk and resilience for startups, SMEs, and different industries on a more detailed level using empirical data. This study’s findings have important implications for researchers and practitioners and guide the development of effective SC resilience strategies for different types of firms.
... Climate change and human activities for urban development have elevated the probability of extreme heavy rainfall events that trigger flooding (Heinzlef et al., 2019;Mehryar and Surminski, 2022;Restemeyer et al., 2015). As one of the Asian countries, China experiences frequent and severe floods, resulting in significant annual casualties and economic losses. ...
Urban flood is one of the most frequent and deadly natural disasters in the world, seriously affecting urban sustainability and people's well-being in China. As the largest developing country in the world, China urgently needs to improve its urban flood resilience. Previous studies related to urban flood resilience are mostly focused on its assessment method and simulation. However, few studies directly aim to reveal the influencing factors of urban flood resilience and their inner relationships. In order to make a significant contribution to the long-term improvement of urban flood resilience in the context of global climate change and urbanization, it is crucial to explore the influencing mechanisms of urban flood resilience. This study aims to identify key influencing factors and their interactions on urban flood resilience in China. To this end, a conceptual framework based on Pressure-State-Response model and Social-Economic-Natural Complex Ecosystem theory (PSR-SENCE model) are established and 24 factors are identified within three dimensions. The relationships between the factors are tested using a fuzzy-DEMATEL method. The results reveal that factors in pressure and response dimensions have a greater impact on the whole system, while the factors in the state dimension are more influenced by the other two dimensions. The results identify 14 critical factors, with four detailed influence paths discussed among the different dimensions. Accordingly, the implications for improving urban flood resilience are discussed within the context of the key influencing paths. The study provides a theoretical basis and approach to directly explore how the factors influencing urban flood resilience and proposes specific impact paths and improvement implications.
... Multiple quantitative resilience assessments have been developed within the last few years (Gerges et al., 2022;Heinzlef et al., 2019;Hsieh & Feng, 2020;Javadpoor et al., 2021;Kaaviya & Devadas, 2021;Poo et al., 2021). They often become frameworks for enhancing knowledge and guiding infrastructure adaptation. ...
Climate change is affecting infrastructure in complex and uncertain ways. Traditional load factors, safety factors, and design standards appear misaligned with current and anticipated future conditions. Thus, adapting infrastructure for a changing climate will likely necessitate balancing trade-offs between new and old design paradigms. This literature review summarizes advances in the implementation and research of resilient infrastructure within the context of climate change. We identified three categories of adaptation strategies: (1) assessments and frameworks to incorporate climate data and risks into infrastructure design and planning, (2) modelling of decision making under uncertainty and policy analysis, and (3) examples of best practices, case studies, and workarounds to enhance resilience. This work highlights advances in infrastructure decision making under uncertainty and ways to instill resilience into infrastructure systems. It is expected to help form a knowledge basis for transitioning to infrastructure planning, design, and implementation that is congruous with a changing world.
... The findings show that in the future, the overall positive effect of adaptive measures on the three communities is three times higher than that of engineering measures. Compared with similar studies, resilience improvement strategies are evaluated in different resilience research frameworks [50,51], but there is a lack of quantitative and comparative analyses of specific measures. It is therefore unclear to what extent the measures will affect regional resilience and to what extent they will make a difference. ...
Various flood resilience enhancement measures have been proposed to deal with the growing problem of urban flooding. However, there is a lack of evaluation about the applicability of these measures at a community scale. This paper investigates the effects of two types of flood resilience enhancement measures: engineering measures and adaptive measures, in order to explore their effectiveness in different flood-prone communities. A community-scale oriented flood resilience assessment method is used to assess the impact of different types of measures. A case study is applied in three communities that suffer from waterlogging problems in Jingdezhen city, China. Results show that there are spatial differences of flood resilience in three flood-prone communities. Future scenarios present a poorer performance in flood resilience compared to current scenarios due to the effects of urbanization and human activities. Engineering measures are suitable for the old communities with high-density residential areas when sitting alongside the river, for example the communities of Fuliang and Zhushan. On the other hand, adaptive measures exhibit more efficiency in improving flood resilience in all communities, especially effective for the new city town Changjiang where engineering measures are nearly saturated. The findings can help local governments develop appropriate flood resilience enhancement strategies for different types of communities.
... Thus, customizing plans based on the local context becomes necessary to increase SC resilience. Studies related to climate change (Heinzlef et al., 2019;Langholtz et al., 2014) recommend strategies to mitigate disruptions early. ...
... And as Lhomme et al. (2013) stated, networks then act as vectors of risk propagation. These analysis principles have been implemented by several authors, for example, by studying the effects of Hurricane Katrina (Heinzlef et al., 2019) and New Orleans' recovery (Balsells et al., 2012) after this event. ...
Coastlines are subject to multiple developments related to land use planning and the effects of climate change. These developments generally lead to an increase in the risk of coastal flooding. This article focuses on systems to protect against this hazard, and presents a bibliographical analysis on methods and operational tools to strengthen their resilience. This analysis is carried out by considering that a system of protection is a component of the territory to which it provides protection and that it is therefore necessary to study in depth the relations between this system and the various components of the territory (the natural environment, the built environment and the social and institutional environment). Based on this hypothesis, the concepts of risk and resilience applied to floods are specified and the protection and adaptation strategies commonly used in recent decades are described. This retrospective on concepts and strategies leads us to structure the state-of-the-art analysis on methods and operational tools in relation to two issues: 1) understanding risks; 2) adapting and transforming protection systems. In each case, the use of the concept of resilience implies a clear distinction between systemic and analytical approaches. Finally, this bibliographical analysis reveals the need to revise the protection system concept in order to promote the integration of these systems in the territories. Accordingly, new methodological developments could be considered using ecosystem and socio-economic approaches.
... There are different methods to assess resiliency. Some methods assess specific part of urban resilience while others have a broader approach in scope [9][10][11][12][13]. Few types of researches to measure empirical resilience have passed the theoretical stage. ...
Those involved in making resilience strategies and planning are struggling to understand the dynamic and complexity of urban areas and should be presented with a systematic tool, both in assessment and planning, to help them make important choices about which actions, plans, and policies to implement. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that these methods are based on sound theory and are simple and comprehensible. Proper and accurate measurement of resilience are the steppingstones in developing effective resilience plan. Recently, there has been efforts to create tools to measure resilience in urban areas. Several tools have been created, however, there is a lack of evidence-based analysis into these assessment tools. This study is going to address this gap by finding a systemic and holistic approach to assess resilience. The aim is to determine the criteria required for assessing the resilience of the urban complex system by asking series of questions. Furthermore, existing urban resilience assessment tools evaluated to determine whether they can measure urban resilience holistically. Any method to assess resiliency in complex urban systems has to take a holistic approach. The whole urban system needs to be studied to be able to determine the overall behaviour of the system. The Auckland region was chosen to demonstrate how the study's concepts can be applied. Following consideration of specific resiliency criteria, 28 questions were developed evaluate the assessment tools. The Disaster Resilience Scorecard was chosen as the best measuring tool for the determined criteria to be ran within a city.
... The desire to develop the resilience of territories also leads to the establishment of risk observatories [39,40]. However, these methods are either very general and based on a narrow set of indicators [41,42], relate to infrastructure and urban networks [43][44][45][46][47], or relate to protection structures without establishing a link with the rest of the territory, as previously established. A method has, therefore, been developed with the objective of comprehensively understanding the reaction of a territory to a marine submersion event, with particular attention to the relations between the protection system and its natural and built environment. ...
Storm Xynthia, which hit the French Atlantic coast on February 28th, 2010, flooded vast territories despite coastal defences. This disaster highlighted the need to further study the behaviour of the coastal flood protection systems at an adapted geographical scale by considering the kine-matics of the events. This objective has been achieved through a combination of conceptual input on the definition of protection systems, significant breakthroughs in the knowledge of the mechanisms governing the flooding, and via the improvement of strategies and methods dedicated to flood analysis and representation. The developed methodology was successfully tested on four sites submerged during Xynthia (Loix, Les Boucholeurs, and Boyardville, located in Charente-Maritime, and Batz-sur-Mer, located in Loire-Atlantique). This work is intended to guide the diagnosis of sites prone to marine flooding from the first investigations until the delivery of study reports. Beyond the usual focus on hydraulic structures, it provides guidelines to better analyse the interactions with the natural environment (sea, soil, dune, wetlands, etc.) and with the built environment (roads and urban networks, ponds used for fish farming, buildings, etc.). This systemic approach, which is applied to a territory considered as a complex adaptive system, is fundamental to understanding the reaction of a territory during a marine submersion event and subsequently developing adaptation or transformation strategies.
... Moreover, flood losses estimation played the basic role in flood risk analysis (Heinzlef et al., 2019;Xu et al., 2020). Flood losses assessment included historical and empirical data method, and input-output method. ...
Increasing urban flood posed serious threat to urban safety and sustainable development, and resulted in great loss and damage. It was significant and indispensable to master the potential change of urban flood for flood risk mitigation and adaption. Floods not merely caused the physical losses, but also led to potential damage and harm during flood risk propagation. Studies have mainly focused on the physical features of flood risk and post-disaster reconstruction, while few have discussed the potential risk consequence considering flood risk propagation. Therefore, this study analyzed flood risk propagation based on modified Susceptible Infected Recovered (SIR) model. We performed flood simulation and modelling, mapped urban flood risk in consideration of flood risk propagation, and estimated flood losses in Nanjing with flood return periods of 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 years. Results indicated that inundated area occupied 517.19, 654.11, 657.92, 834.49 and 1045.80 km² with return periods from 5 to 100 years respectively. Jianye District showed high flood risk and it was suggested to protect people’s lives and assets to reduce susceptibility and vulnerability, and enhance urban drainage capacity for recovery improvement. Moreover, total economic losses reached $27.85, $30.89, $32.91, $35.50 and $38.55 billion and led to the 14.38%, 15.94%, 15.94%, 18.32% and 19.90% GDP loss rate respectively. This study could support the effective flood risk mitigation practice for adaptive urban development.
... Some scholars have defined the concept of flood resilience from different scales such as building units, cities, river basins, and regions ( Table 1). The common point is that on the one hand, they emphasize the ability to withstand flood hazards, and on the other hand, they emphasize the ability to recover after the hazard has taken place [16]. The single-scale flood resilience of a building emphasizes more on the physical structure to resist flood hazards, while the urban and regional flood resilience emphasizes the accumulation of experience and pays attention to social structures and spatial characteristics [17]. ...
Flooding has become the natural disaster that causes the greatest losses, with urban flooding restricting the healthy development of cities. The ability to assess a city’s resilience to flooding is very important and would contribute to improving resilience and also help to inform planning and development. The aim of this study was to determine the key urban flood resilience indicators for three different Chinese cities (Wuhan, Nanjing, and Hefei) and to prioritize these for each city. A combined interpretive structure and network analysis method (ISM-ANP) model was used to evaluate and analyze the selected evaluation indicators. A four-level urban flood resilience evaluation network model was constructed to determine the interdependence between indicators and to calculate the priorities of the flood resilience indicators for the three cities. Overall, rescue capacity was found to be extremely important and was defined as the most important index. For Wuhan, indicators related to the distribution of waters were found to be more important, while for Nanjing, spatial planning and spatial structure of land use were found to be key priorities. In Hefei, the level of investment in infrastructure and the level of public resources occupy a more important position. The framework presented in this study contributes to the understanding of urban flood resilience and has the potential to be extended to other natural hazards.
... Song et al. (2019) proposed the new thought to explore spatial pattern between vulnerability and resilience to conduct the study of urban resilience from the perspective of spatial balance. Furthermore, not only shock and disturbance from external disaster (natural or man-made disaster) make the urban systems less resilient and vulnerable to climaterelated disasters, but also internal changes (urban movements, urban growth, urban structural changes) (Serre and Heinzlef 2018;Heinzlef et al. 2019;Dhar and Khirfan 2017). ...
The increasing flood disasters have led to serious losses and damage around the world, especially in the developing countries. Nanjing, China, has suffered from the frequent urban flood in recent years, which has hindered its sustainable development. This study assessed urban flood resilience in Nanjing based on the resilience dimensions of social, economic, natural, physical, human, political and institutional resilience. Results revealed that urban flood resilience and subdomain resilience showed the increasing trend from 1990 to 2017. Natural, social, natural, physical and political resilience influenced urban flood resilience a lot before 2006, while economic institutional, human and physical resilience made significant contributions after 2006. Economic, political and physical resilience showed the significant direct effect on urban flood resilience and political resilience had the mediating effect in economic and physical resilience.
... And as Lhomme et al. (2013) stated, networks then act as vectors of risk propagation. These analysis principles have been implemented by several authors, for example, by studying the effects of Hurricane Katrina (Heinzlef et al., 2019) and New Orleans' recovery (Balsells et al., 2012) after this event. ...
... This methodology was designed, validated and tested on the urban territory of Avignon (Serre and Heinzlef, 2018;Heinzlef et al., 2019), a territory at the confluence of the Rhone and Durance rivers and subject to the challenges of urban flooding. ...
... Climate change, whose main cause is human and uncontrolled emission of greenhouse gases (Birch 2014), together with phenomena such as rapid urbanization and population growth, acts as the main driver of natural hazards (Shamsuddin 2020). As such, it has led to an annual increase of about 2% in natural hazards over the last 15 years (Heinzlef et al. 2019). These altogether will reduce the coping and resistance capacities of cities and affect all dimensions of cities from environmental to social, economic, and physical (Bottero et al. 2020). ...
Considering the recent and projected increases in the frequency and intensity of hazards, many cities around the world are increasingly taking efforts to build on their resilience. This study focuses on the physical resilience of cities as a relatively under-studied branch of urban resilience. Due to the considerable complexity of the resilience concept, there is still no clear and applicable definition for urban physical resilience. To make this concept more tangible, this study elaborates on the determinant characteristics of physical resilience and explores their interactions. To this end, the characteristics were extracted and conceptualized from the review of previous research, and also using the Delphi method. The Interpretive Structural Modeling and MICMAC analysis were also used to partition the characteristics, determine the driving and dependent elements, and clarify the complex concepts of physical resilience. Then, the DEMATEL method was employed to quantitatively analyze the interrelationships and interactions among the characteristics and determine the causal relationships. The results showed that ‘redundancy’ and ‘robustness’ are two key characteristics that contribute to the physical resilience of cities. Also, the characteristics were partitioned into different levels based on driving and dependence power, and the cause and effect categories of characteristics were determined based on the interactions. The results from this research can be used for resilience-based urban and spatial planning to bridge the gap between the theory of physical resilience of cities and its practical approaches. Moreover, urban planners should pay special attention to and focus on the driving elements (i.e., causes), to provide the context for the proper realization of the dependent elements (i.e., effects).
... In this sense, this methodology is also applicable to assess path dependencies and other environmental and socioeconomic impacts as well, similarly to the main aim of the present study. Besides quantitative and qualitative approaches in assessing impacts of urban renewal projects, GIS-based methods are spreading nowadays and help both scientists and decision-makers to evaluate urban regeneration actions (see among other things, Wang et al., 2013, Lin et al., 2017, Heinzlef et al., 2019, Omidipoor et al., 2019. ...
Urban areas play a pivotal role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to adverse effects of climate change, worldwide. Climate-related assessment of urban development projects shall contribute to reduce complex climate vulnerability, especially in fast growing cities in emerging economies. Hungarian cities face significant challenges regarding changing climatic patterns, consequently climate-oriented assessment methodology to evaluate the performance of urban development interventions is needed. The main aim of the research was to elaborate on a comprehensive methodology that can define mitigation, adaptation, and awareness-raising aspects of interventions; moreover may reveal path dependencies in order to avoid negative lock-ins during urban development activities. The developed method uses a three-step scoring approach to assess both direct and indirect impacts of selected interventions while taking into account the main objectives of the Budapest Climate Change Strategy as evaluation criteria in order to strengthen local-specific characters. By applying the developed methodology, the main conclusions can be defined by paying attention to weaknesses and strengths of the selected interventions regarding mitigation, adaptation, and awareness-raising issues; thus, further recommendations were identified to improve their overall climate performance and to avoid negative lock-ins.
... Consequently, we highlighted the characteristics of both resilience and then urban resilience, and how they play their parts in both the conceptualisation of resilient systems and the practice of resilient city. Therefore, the way in which operationalisation of urban resilience (Heinzlef et al. 2019) takes place, can be developed as a territorial approach, or even through spatio-temporal, and sociotemporal methods (Hogg et al. 2016;Komugabe-Dixson et al. 2019;Jiang et al. 2020) or patterns (Ma et al. 2019;Aswi et al. 2020) of monitory and enhancement of the city. Nevertheless, argue that there is a general lack of operationalisation frameworks for the development of resilience in cities-something that is also addressed in this book. ...
https://www.springer.com/cn/book/9789811554865
This book fills a major gap in academic research, by exploring ‘urban resilience measures’ and ‘city management issues’ during disruptive disease outbreak events. Based on the overarching concept of ‘resilience thinking’, it addresses critical issues of preparedness, responsiveness and reflectiveness in the event of outbreak, focusing on cities and how they should prepare to combat a variety of adversities and uncertainties caused by outbreaks. This comprehensive book is an essential guide for decision-makers, city authorities, planners, healthcare and public health authorities, and those communities and businesses that face disease outbreak events. It also offers a set of practical measures to support the development of tailor-made strategies in the form of an action plan. These strategies should address outbreak control and containment measures, institutional rearrangements, management of urban systems, and healthiness of the society. Divided into six chapters, this book explores important topics of ‘urban resilience’ and ‘city management’ for preparedness action plans and responsiveness planning. Further, it presents a comprehensive urban resilience approach used to support city management in the recent outbreaks in Chinese cities, which can be applied in cities around the globe to strengthen their resilience and maximise the practicality of urban resilience and minimise urban vulnerabilities during disease outbreaks. Highlighting topics such as maintaining societal well-being, community engagement, and multi-sectoral city management enhancement, this book offers a unique combination of research, practices and lessons learned to aid cities in need.
... Consequently, we highlighted the characteristics of both resilience and then urban resilience, and how they play their parts in both the conceptualisation of resilient systems and the practice of resilient city. Therefore, the way in which operationalisation of urban resilience (Heinzlef et al. 2019) takes place, can be developed as a territorial approach, or even through spatio-temporal, and sociotemporal methods (Hogg et al. 2016;Komugabe-Dixson et al. 2019;Jiang et al. 2020) or patterns (Ma et al. 2019;Aswi et al. 2020) of monitory and enhancement of the city. Nevertheless, Marana et al. (2019) argue that there is a general lack of operationalisation frameworks for the development of resilience in cities-something that is also addressed in this book. ...
Part of the Book:
The City in Need: Urban Resilience and City Management in Disruptive Disease Outbreak Events
https://www.springer.com/cn/book/9789811554865#aboutBook
... Cities 101 (2020) 102688 However, these strategies for bridging the gap between knowledge and practice in terms of building climate resilience have often fallen short, resulting in less effective CC resilience-building plans (Handayani et al., 2019;Keenan, 2018;Toubin et al., 2014). The reason behind this is highlighted in several studies in the literature (Colloff et al., 2017;Heinzlef, Becue, & Serre, 2019;Ludin & Arbon, 2017;Saxena, Qui, & Robinson, 2018;Serre & Heinzlef, 2018;Tyler & Moench, 2012). Overall, these studies have assessed the operationalisation of city resilience of CC and they highlight the challenge of having to address the interactions between the social, economic and ecological factors that define cities as complex systems. ...
Climate change (CC) is one of the most urgent threats to modern societies, having direct and indirect consequences on the rapid growth of urban areas. Cities are attempting to both reduce their impact on the environment and build resilience to be able to face the irreversible effects of CC through plans and strategies. However, barriers, such as the fact that cities are complex systems and the uncertainty posed by CC have led to less engaged and committed city stakeholders, which have hampered the operationalisation of city resilience. In this context, developing city stakeholders awareness has been demonstrated to be an effective way to put an end to passive behaviour and help transform cities so they are more climate-resilient. Thus, we posit that developing city stakeholder awareness leads to more effective implementation of CC resilience-building plans. To that end, this paper presents a framework that defines the awareness-development process and combines it with an educational simulation tool that facilitates understanding of the theory presented in the framework. Finally, the paper presents a pilot test in the city of Kristiansand, Norway, to show the contribution of the simulation tool in improving city stakeholder awareness.
Flood vulnerabilities and eviction threats are challenges informal settlement residents encounter in urban Africa. Although recent literature posits emerging residents’ coping and adaptive capacity to flooding, research on African cities is scarce. To address such a knowledge gap, this chapter explores micro-level flood response strategies in Old Fadama—one of Ghana’s informal settlements—and their sustainability implications of providing residents with long-term relief from flood vulnerabilities. Findings reveal that residents’ awareness and experience with floods have led to some individual and community-level responses. Nonetheless, perennial flooding in the community is indicative of the limits of such response strategies in tackling flood vulnerability. This situation is compounded by local government threats of evictions after flood disasters. Together, these undermine the sustainability of residents emerging coping and adaptive capacities. This chapter, therefore, argues for an integrated community-based urban flood management approach that engages informal settlement residents’ response strategies and their socio-ecological circumstances to provide sustainable pathways to traverse their flood vulnerabilities.KeywordsFlood vulnerabilitiesInformal settlementsSustainabilityResponse strategiesGhana
Faced with increasing risks and uncertainties in urban environments, local planners and decision-makers are forced to innovate their risk management strategies. In the 2000s, this strategy, which used to be focused on a hazard management, integrated new concepts such as the concept of resilience. Resilience, a multidisciplinary concept, is defined in the context of risk management as the capacity of a system to absorb a disruption and return to equilibrium following this disruption. This concept refers to technical, urban, architectural, political, economic, social, management, and environmental innovations in order to (re)question our risk management systems and approaches. This injunction to innovation perfectly suits our complex and evolutive urban world. Nevertheless, and despite a significant increase of the resilience concept in urban risk management, concrete advances still have to be made. For many actors, resilience remains at the level of discourse and political leitmotivs, without being integrated into strategies, management, and projects that are achievable and adapted to the territories. Faced with this observation, several research projects have sought to adapt this concept to the needs and requirements of local stakeholders in order to promote its adoption and integration into risk management strategies. This chapter will analyze some of these strategies.KeywordsUrban resilienceRisk managementDisaster reductionUncertainties hazard
The breach of urban planning, water sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure enabling food and water exposure at an alarming rate to contamination with Vibrio cholerae organisms is the major cause of cholera outbreaks. The purpose of this chapter is to identify and quantify the risk of spread of cholera in post-flood scenario. It attempts to assess the interconnection between cholera outbreaks and flooding in Nigeria using the recurrence of flooding in Nigeria in relation to the incidences of cholera outbreak cases of the disease between 1970 and 2010 using existing literature and datasets. The distribution map revealed the magnitude of exposure and susceptibility to cholera outbreak after flood incident which is predominant in the northern part of the country. Exposure of water supply to high rates of flooding and runoff is basically connected to the 2010 outbreak of cholera from the north to the south of the country.This study suggested that intensive epidemiological studies on “cause-effect relationship,” between infectious diseases and disasters, are necessary in controlling post-disaster outbreaks. The risk involved in disaster, most especially post-disaster conditions, requires proper assessment and also adequate measures requiring immediate implementation such as improving healthcare delivery services needs maximum attention. Flood prevention and mitigation strategies demand systematic evaluation through comprehensive surveillance, well-coordinated collaborations, emergency, and early warning systems.KeywordsDisaster mitigationFloodHealthCholeraResilienceNexus
Urban transport infrastructures (TIs) play a central role in an urban society that faces more and more disasters. TIs, part of critical infrastructures (CIs), are highly correlated with urban disaster management in terms of their resilience when cities are facing a crisis or disaster. According to many studies, indicator assessment has been frequently used for the resilience management of CIs in recent decades. Defining and characterizing indicators can be useful for disaster managers as it could help monitor and improve the capacities and performance of TIs. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is (1) to identify and summarize the existing indicators of TIs resilience from the currently available literature, and (2) to discuss the possible future studies of the resilience indicator of TIs. The first results indicated that there are some barriers to identify indicators following the common search method through keywords. Additionally, the indicators found are mainly related to technical information, the disruption stage, and internal TIs. Finally, due to the complexity of indicator assessment, sub-indicators and indicator spatialization are widely used in the resilience assessment of urban TIs studies.
The COVID-19 crisis raised issues over the resources and capacities of small islands and their populations, at high risk through various economic dependencies and health system limitations. French Polynesia was deeply shaken economically, politically, socially, psychologically and geographically by the threat and impact of the virus. Serious mortality outcomes underlined intrinsic vulnerabilities in the territory, in several categories – geographical, social, economic and spatial imbalances –at several scales. They influenced the response of the Polynesian government and its population to the health threat. Limited success raised a critical question over whether it is possible to mitigate intrinsic vulnerability by developing more resilient risk management strategies, and their means of implementation, for example by land use planning, economic development, political devolution and other strategies.
As the frequency and severity of climate-related disasters increases, understanding how to improve urban resilience has become an important area of research. The first step in improving urban resilience to climate-related disasters is the assessment of current levels of resilience. Through a systematic review, this study aims to answer the following questions about current urban resilience assessment: 1) what are the most common characteristics of urban resilience; 2) what are the most commonly involved dimensions of urban ecosystems; and 3) what are most frequently applied methods. This study concludes by providing recommendations for future resilience assessments, including the employment of more holistic assessments for urban ecosystems as a whole and in parts and a unifying framing based on urban resilience characteristics for comparing resilience assessments across studies. This review of current resilience assessment literature can be a starting point for scholars and practitioners to optimize resilience assessments and, in turn, improve urban resilience.
Enhancing resilience is critical for coastal urban systems to cope with and minimize flood disaster risks. This issue is certainly more important in Africa, where the increase in flood frequency is a significant concern for many areas. In this context, urban planners need accurate approaches to set up a standard for measuring the resilience to floods. In Morocco, this issue is still not fully covered by the scientific community despite the obvious need for a new approach adapted to local conditions. This study applied a composite index and geographic-information-system approach to measure and map resilience to floods in three northern coastal municipalities. The approach is also based on a linear ranking of resilience parameters, offering a more optimal classification of spatial resilience variation. The results allowed us to identify specific areas with different resilience levels and revealed the relationship between urban dimensions and the flood resilience degree. This approach provides an efficient decision-support tool to facilitate flood risk management, especially in terms of prioritizing protective actions.
Extreme weather conditions, as one of many effects of climate change, is expected to increase the magnitude and frequency of environmental disasters. In parallel, urban centres are also expected to grow significantly in the next years, making necessary to implement the adequate mechanisms to tackle such threats, more specifically flooding.
This project aims to develop a flood prediction system using a combination of Machine Learning classifiers along with GIS techniques to be used as an effective tool for urban management and resilience planning. This approach can establish sensible factors and risk indices for the occurrence of floods at the city level, which could be instrumental for outlining a long-term strategy for Smart Cities.
The most performant Machine Learning model was a Random Forest, with a Matthew’s Correlation Coefficient of 0.77 and an Accuracy of 0.96.
To support and extend the capabilities of the Machine Learning model, a GIS model was developed to find areas with higher likelihood of being flooded under critical weather conditions. Therefore, hot spots were defined for the entire city given the observed flood history. The scores obtained from the Random Forest model and the Hot Spot analysis were then combined to create a flood risk index.
France experiences catastrophic floods on a yearly basis, with significant societal impacts. In this paper, we employ a historical assessment of catastrophic past flood events in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (PACA) region and perform Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT)-analysis to evaluate some aspects of the French Flood Risk Governance (FRG) system and suggest improvements. Our evaluation shows that despite persistent government efforts, the impacts of flood events in the region do not appear to have lessened over time. Identical losses in the same locations (e.g. Riou de l’Argentière watershed) can be observed after repetitive catastrophic events (e.g. 2015, 2019) triggering local inhabitant protests. To avoid future disasters, we suggest that the French FRG should benefit from the following improvements: a) regular updates of the risk prevention plans and tools; b) the adoption of a Build Back Better logic instead of promoting the reconstruction of damaged elements in the same locations; c) taking into account undeclared damages into flood risk models (and not only those declared to flood insurance); d) increased communication between the actors of the different steps of each cycle (prepare, control, organise etc.); e) increased communication between three main elements of the cycle (risk prevention, emergency management and disaster recovery); f) an approach that extends the risk analysis outside the borders of the drainage basin (to be used in combination with the current basin risk models); and g) increased participation in FRG from local population. We also briefly discuss the use operational research methods for the optimisation of the French FRG.
This paper presents a research project spanning over 15 years, dealing with territorial resilience to flooding. This paper presents a global retrospective view on how research on the concept of resilience began with a primary focus on critical infrastructure resilience networks. These infrastructures are always identified by experts as an aggravating factor leading to territorial systems disruptions. The focus on critical infrastructure resilience networks served as an important first step to improve knowledge on mechanism failures and their impacts on communities. However, this first step was insufficient in providing more resilient systems and territories to floods. Today, other approaches are useful for implementing strategies of resilience to answer city managers’ needs, such as organizational strategies, including participative tools. Long-term resilience is addressed within this research for territorial resilience monitoring and planning. This article is primarily based and illustrated on the research, projects and scientific advances conducted by the authors.
This paper proposes a review of existing strategies and tools aiming at facilitating the operationalization of the concept of resilience into built environments. In a context of climate change, increased risks in urban areas and growing uncertainties, urban managers are forced to innovate in order to design appropriate risk management strategies. Among these strategies, making cities resilient has become an imperative. This injunction to innovation fits perfectly with the urban, economic, political, social and ecological complexity of the contemporary world. As a result, the concept of resilience is integrated into the issues of urban sprawl and the associated risks. However, despite this theoretical and conceptual adequacy, resilience remains complex to integrate into the practices of urban planners and territorial actors. Its multitude of definitions and approaches has contributed to its abstraction and lack of operationalization. This review highlights the multitude of approaches and methodologies to address the bias of the lack of integration of the concept of resilience in risk management. The limit is the multiplication of these strategies which lead to conceptual vagueness and a lack of tangible application at the level of local actors. The challenge would then be to design a toolbox to concentrate the various existing tools, conceptual models and decision support systems in order to facilitate the autonomy and responsibility of local stakeholders in integrating the concept of resilience into risk management strategies.
Faced with increasing urbanization and uncertainties linked to climate change, the scientific community has integrated the concept of resilience into urban management practices. Once revolutionary, now a buzzword, resilience is a concept that is difficult to transform into an integrated tool that stakeholders accept and adopt. This paper offers a perspective on the different interpretations of resilience, its difficult implementation and the tools that seek to operationalize it. The underlying questions are how these tools are appropriated by urban managers and territorial decision-makers, and how the theoretical concept can be translated into resilient urban development. This research paper reviews the work on resilience and investigates its use and operationalization, comparing two different approaches – organizational (Canada) and holistic (France) – that aim to clarify and operationalize resilience. These theoretical approaches have been combined to create workshops for urban managers so they can move from theoretical results to practical applications.
In the context of climate change and increasing urbanization, floods are considerably affecting urban areas. The concept of urban resilience may be an interesting means of responding to urban flood issues. The objective of this research is to propose a spatial decision support tool based on geovisualization techniques and a resilience assessment method. The goal is to localize the level of resilience modelled in different territories. The methodology proposed consists of integrating three resilience indicators applied to a case study in Avignon (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, France) and the use of geovisualization techniques: using GIS for data processing and analysis, visualization, mapping, and model processing. The methodology integrates decision-making by identifying characteristics capable of improving urban resilience and facilitating its understanding using a visual tool. The results demonstrate the usefulness of modelling resilience using geovisualization techniques to identify the potential for local resilience; integrate local stakeholders into a process of clarifying the concept through the contribution of visualization; and consider easier access to this concept based on data analysis, processing and visualization through the design of maps.
Cascading events can be referred to multidimensional disasters, where a primary trigger generates a nonlinear series of secondary emergencies that escalate in time, becoming eventually the priority to tackle. In this process, critical infrastructure can be handled as roots of vulnerabilities, because they accumulate both physical attributes and functional nodes. When compromised, they produce widespread breakdowns of society, but also orient emergency responses and long-term recovery. Although floods have been widely associated to the failure of vulnerable equipments or to the disruption of strategic sectors such as energy, communication and transportation, their integration with the emerging concept of cascading has been limited. This open topic presents many challenges for scholars, researchers and practitioners, in particular when the implementation of the EU Floods Directive is considered. The paper presents an overview of the Floods Directive and its relation with the cascading events, using case studies and examples from the existing literature to point out missing links and gaps in the legislation. Conclusions argue that the Directive considers only local geographical scales and limited temporal horizons, which can be result inadequate to limit the escalation of events.
The behaviour of the urban network infrastructures, and their interactions during flood events, will have direct and indirect consequences on the flood risk level in the built environment. By urban network infrastructures we include all the urban technical networks like transportation, energy, water supply, waste water, telecommunication…able to spread the flood risk in cities, qualified as critical infrastructures due to their major roles for modern living standards. From history, most of cities in the world have been built close to coast lines or to river to beneficiate this means of communication and trade. Step by step, to avoid being flooded, defences like levees have been built. The capacity of the levees to retain the floods depends on their conditions, their performance level and the capacity of the authorities to well maintain these infrastructures. But recent history shows the limits of a flood risk management strategy focused on protection, leading to levee breaks these last decades. Then, in case of levee break, cities will be flooded. The urban technical networks, due to the way they have been designed, their conditions and their locations in the city, will play a major role in the diffusion of the flood extent. Also, the flood risk will have consequences in some not flooded neighbourhoods due to networks collapses and complex interdependencies. This article describes some methods to design spatial decision support systems in that context.
The Holistic Integrity Test (HIT) - Quantified Resilience Analysis. Rising sea levels and wider climate change mean we face an increasing risk from flooding and other natural hazards. Tough economic times make it difficult to economically justify or afford the desired level of engineered risk reduction. Add to this significant uncertainty from a range of future predictions, constantly updated with new science. We therefore need to understand not just how to reduce the risk, but what could happen should above design standard events occur. In flood terms this includes not only the direct impacts (damage and loss of life), but the wider cascade impacts to infrastructure systems and the longer term impacts on the economy and society. However, understanding the “what if” is only the first part of the equation; a range of improvement measures to mitigate such effects need to be identified and implemented. These measures should consider reducing the risk, lessening the consequences, aiding the response, and speeding up the recovery. However, they need to be objectively assessed through quantitative analysis, which underpins them technically and economically. Without such analysis, it cannot be predicted how measures will perform if the extreme events occur. It is also vital to consider all possible hazards as measures for one hazard may hinder the response to another. The Holistic Integrity Test (HIT), uses quantitative system analysis and “HITs” the site, its infrastructure, contained dangers and wider regional system to determine how it copes with a range of severe shock events, Before, During and After the event, whilst also accounting for uncertainty (as illustrated in figure 1). First explained at the TINCE 2014 Nuclear Conference in Paris, it was explained in terms of a Nuclear Facility needing to analyse the site in response to post Fukushima needs; the hit is however universally applicable. The HIT has three key risk reduction goals: The ability to tolerate and withstand shocks, while continuing to sustain key safety functions; the ability to wisely direct and manage the crisis situation, accounting for the diverse scenarios that could occur; to be able to quickly recovery and stabilise to a safe and secure state that is stable and sustainable in the long term.
This paper examines the development over historical time of the meaning and
uses of the term resilience. The objective is to deepen our understanding of
how the term came to be adopted in disaster risk reduction and resolve some
of the conflicts and controversies that have arisen when it has been used.
The paper traces the development of resilience through the sciences,
humanities, and legal and political spheres. It considers how mechanics
passed the word to ecology and psychology, and how from there it was adopted
by social research and sustainability science. As other authors have noted,
as a concept, resilience involves some potentially serious conflicts or
contradictions, for example between stability and dynamism, or between
dynamic equilibrium (homeostasis) and evolution. Moreover, although the
resilience concept works quite well within the confines of general systems
theory, in situations in which a systems formulation inhibits rather than
fosters explanation, a different interpretation of the term is warranted.
This may be the case for disaster risk reduction, which involves
transformation rather than preservation of the "state of the system". The
article concludes that the modern conception of resilience derives benefit
from a rich history of meanings and applications, but that it is
dangerous – or at least potentially disappointing – to read to much into the
term as a model and a paradigm.
Resilience is widely used in flood risk management policies, but still largely conceptually. Despite notable advances in social-ecological sciences and numerous attempts to make it operational, there is still a limited number of empirical and quantitative case studies to demonstrate the practical relevance in flood risk management. Nevertheless, the concept of resilience (as opposed to resistanceii) represents a new way of thinking about flood disaster mitigation embracing the philosophy that, as a society, we should learn to live with floods and to manage flood risk and not seek to avoid it. Resilient flood risk strategies aim at reducing flood risk through a combination of protection, prevention and preparedness spanning a wide range of flood probabilities (from regular to rare flood events).
Urbanization is a major driver of land use change and global environmental decline. With accelerated urbanization worldwide, it is essential to put in place new policies to conserve urban ecosystems, species and the services these provide in order to secure more sustainable, resilient and livable cities for the 21st century. In urban planning, the concept of resilience has broadly replaced the word sustainability. In recent years, resilience indicators have been gradually developed, but few address urban resilience from a social-ecological systems perspective. We develop a methodological framework to measure urban resilience, define an urban resilience index and apply it to Spanish province capitals as a case study. Results show that most Spanish province capitals are far from being resilient. We conclude that increased efforts to measure urban resilience should be in place, and we offer the urban resilience index as a theoretical framework for measuring resilience in urban social-ecological systems that can be gradually improved as more data become available.
Critical infrastructure and facilities are central assets in modern societies, but their impact on international disaster relief remains mostly associated with logistics challenges. The emerging literature on cascading disasters suggests the need to integrate the non-linearity of events in the analyses. This article investigates three case studies: the 2002 floods in the Czech Republic, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima meltdown in Japan. We explore how the failure of critical infrastructure can orient international disaster relief by shifting its priorities during the response. We argue that critical infrastructure can influence aid request and delivery, changing needs to address the cascades and contain cascading technology-based events. The conclusions propose remaining challenges with applying our findings.
The adoption of the European Floods Directive (2007/60/EC) represented a crucial improvement in the management of watercourses and coastlines. However, the beginning of a new phase of implementation requires the assessment of which emerging topics may be included in the review process. The aim of our research is to understand the existence of any legislative gaps that could limit the preparedness to cascading events and critical infrastructures breakdowns. First, we provide a review of the Floods Directive, the cascading phenomena and the vulnerability of critical infrastructures in the European legislation. Secondly, we analyse some case studies to test the present approach and to improve the work of decision makers. Our results suggest that the Floods Directive tends to focus on localized flood impacts at smaller time scale and it could be ineffective to address the cross-scale impact of cascading events. Although some of the corrective actions may not be of competence of the Directive, we argue that their inclusion could limit uncertainties in the attribution of responsibilities and the coordination among different institutional levels. © 2016 International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research.
Cascading effects and cascading disasters are emerging fields of scientific research. The widespread diffusion of functional networks increases the complexity of interdependent systems and their vulnerability to large-scale disruptions. Although in recent years studies of interconnections and chain effects have improved significantly, cascading phenomena are often associated with the ‘‘toppling domino metaphor’’, or with high-impact, low-probability events. This paper aimed to support a paradigm shift in the state of the art by proposing a new theoretical approach to cascading events in terms of their root causes and lack of predictability. By means of interdisciplinary theory building, we demonstrate how cascades reflect the ways in which panarchies collapse. We suggest that the vulnerability of critical infrastructure may orientate the progress of events in relation to society’s feedback loops, rather than merely being an effect of natural triggers. Our conclusions point to a paradigm shift in the preparedness phase that could include escalation points and social nodes, but that also reveals a brand new field of research for disaster scholars.
Fostering resilience in the face of environmental, socioeconomic, and political uncertainty and risk has captured the attention of academics and decision makers across disciplines, sectors, and scales. Resilience has become an important goal for cities, particularly in the face of climate change. Urban areas house the majority of the world's population, and, in addition to functioning as nodes of resource consumption and as sites for innovation, have become laboratories for resilience, both in theory and in practice. This paper reviews the scholarly literature on urban resilience and concludes that the term has not been well defined. Existing definitions are inconsistent and underdeveloped with respect to incorporation of crucial concepts found in both resilience theory and urban theory. Based on this literature review, and aided by bibliometric analysis, the paper identifies six conceptual tensions fundamental to urban resilience: (1) definition of ‘urban’; (2) understanding of system equilibrium; (3) positive vs. neutral (or negative) conceptualizations of resilience; (4) mechanisms for system change; (5) adaptation versus general adaptability; and (6) timescale of action. To advance this burgeoning field, more conceptual clarity is needed. This paper, therefore, proposes a new definition of urban resilience. This definition takes explicit positions on these tensions, but remains inclusive and flexible enough to enable uptake by, and collaboration among, varying disciplines. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the definition might serve as a boundary object, with the acknowledgement that applying resilience in different contexts requires answering: Resilience for whom and to what? When? Where? And why?
Nowadays, the flood risk appears as one of the most catastrophic natural risks. It is the most frequent and its impacts can be devastating at environ - mental, societal and economic levels. Past disasters revealed the strong vulnerability of urban systems coping flood risk. Yet, as cities’ fundamental components for their functioning, the urban systems’ capacity to absorb a disturbance in particular a natural chance is a major stake for the future of our cities. This paper analyzes the resilience of two urban technical systems facing flood risk based on guided transport systems and neighbourhoods. The first ones are physically imbricated in the second, and this interweaving also exists in a functional aspect insofar as the guided transport systems ensure, amongst others, the proper functioning of neighbourhoods. In order to determine more precisely the functioning of these two imbricated systems, the Functional Analysis is mobilized as a depend ability’s method for operating safety. In this paper, performing a Functional Analysis brings in a formal and complete way the chain of generated dysfunctions in case the two urban systems studied are facing with flood.
Thus, this analysis highlights the most vulnerable urban systems in a case of flood hazard and the most critical ones ensuring the global proper functioning of cities.
Existing community resilience assessment methods lack explicit reference to temporality of disruptive events and often use standard metrics that may not be universally appropriate. Linkov et al.’s (Environ Sci Technol 47(18):10108–10110, 2013a; Environ Syst Decis 33(4):471–476, 2013b) Resilience Matrix (RM) framework utilizes local stakeholder-informed metrics aligned with the temporal stages of the National Academy of Science definition of disaster resilience. Here we demonstrate the application of the RM to coastal community resilience at Rockaway Peninsula, New York. We present the flexibility of the RM methodology by using both qualitative and quantitative metrics drawn from post-Hurricane Sandy reports. The presentation of the case study results reveals opportunities to prioritize investments and collaborate among responsible parties.
The flood is a well-known phenomenon in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta (MRD). Although people have experienced the impact of floods for years, some adapt well, but others are vulnerable to floods. Resilience to floods is a useful concept to study the capacity of rural households to cope with, adapt to, and benefit from floods. Knowledge of the resilience of households to floods can help disaster risk managers to design policies for living with floods. Most researchers attempt to define the concept of resilience; very little research operationalizes it in the real context of "living with floods". We employ a subjective well-being approach to measure households' resilience to floods. Items that related to households' capacity to cope with, adapt to, and benefit from floods were developed using both a five-point Likert scale and dichotomous responses. A factor analysis using a standardized form of data was employed to identify underlying factors that explain different properties of households' resilience to floods. Three properties of households' resilience to floods were found: (1) households' confidence in securing food, income, health, and evacuation during floods and recovery after floods; (2) households' confidence in securing their homes not being affected by a large flood event such as the 2000 flood; (3) households' interests in learning and practicing new flood-based farming practices that are fully adapted to floods for improving household income during the flood season. The findings assist in designing adaptive measures to cope with future flooding in the MRD.
A fashionable concept, resilience is now a must in both academic research and management. However, its polysemy nourishes many debates on its uses, heuristics and operational relevance. The purpose of this article is not to bring these debates to a close. Starting from a cross-disciplinary state of the art, we point out the incompatibilities between certain meanings and uses of the term. These inconsistencies raise theoretical issues, leading some researchers to reject the term for that matter, especially those outside the cindynics field. The analysis of the concept also brings out some methodological pitfalls. These are evident when attempting to translate theory into operational terms. Resilience is indeed seen as a promising response to recurrent difficulties in risk management. Nevertheless, it solves them only partially and produces new ones. Lastly, its implementation involves ethical and political risks. The injunction to resilience that seems to prevail internationally is in fact implying a number of moral and ideological assumptions which are not always clearly stated and remain serious issues.
This is a Review Essay. It uses as a starting point ideas from the recent book by Geoff A Wilson, Community resilience and environmental transitions, to develop arguments about the nature of work by geographers on the resilience of human communities. It considers the legacy of ideas about resilience derived from ecology and engineering, whilst noting a third interpretation relating to adaptive resilience and the contribution of work from psychology on resilience in individuals. The Review addresses the notion of ‘community capital’, considering how ideas from Pierre Bourdieu have been extended in the past two decades, including attempts to measure various capitals. Scale effects of resilience are examined as is the development of theory linking multi-functionality and resilience. Related work on adaptability and transition pathways are also addressed as are contributions on the resilience of cities and regions. The Review concludes by presenting critiques of some of the work on resilience, whilst referring to potential alternatives and potentially fruitful future lines of inquiry.
Social vulnerability refers to the socioeconomic and demographic factors that affect the resilience of communities. Studies have shown that in disaster events the socially vulnerable are more likely to be adversely affected, i.e. they are less likely to recover and more likely to die. Effectively addressing social vulnerability decreases both human suffering and the economic loss related to providing social services and public assistance after a disaster. This paper describes the development of a social vulnerability index (SVI), from 15 census variables at the census tract level, for use in emergency management. It also examines the potential value of the SVI by exploring the impact of Hurricane Katrina on local populations.
The term ‘resilience’ is increasingly being used in a multitude of contexts. Seemingly the latest ‘buzz’ word, it can mean many things to many people, in many different situations. In the natural hazard context, the terms ‘sustainable planning’, and ‘resilience planning’ are now being used, often interchangeably. But from a natural hazard perspective, is a resilient community a sustainable one? In order to be sustainable, does a community need to be resilient? The purpose of this paper is to answer these two questions, and stimulate discussion on how the two terms are being used. The paper provides an overview of resilience and sustainability within a land use planning and natural hazard context, and discusses how they are interrelated. The New Zealand legislative requirements for resilience and sustainability are outlined, followed by the presentation of an example from the earthquake impacted city of Christchurch, New Zealand. This example outlines the planning response to the earthquakes, and the sustainable and resilient planning options being implemented. The discussion shows that a resilient community should also be a sustainable community, in order to meet legislative requirements, and – more importantly – to ensure the needs of future generations are met, economically, socially, culturally, and environmentally.
Urbanisation and climate change have increased both the probability and the severity of flooding. The risk paradigm that follows shifts from traditional to more integrated approaches, since one of the main tasks emerging for flood managers is the development of resilient cities. The concept of urban resilience is becoming more and more important, despite the numerous challenges that interfere with its implementation. The goal of this research is to study how engineering and other design disciplines can improve flood resilience on an urban neighbourhood scale. This paper presents the analysis of an overview of research aimed at operationalising urban resilience to floods. This literature highlights the fact that almost no references can be found concerning studies focused on operationalising flood resilience at the neighbourhood level and particularly through urban design practices. Indeed, through interviews conducted with several stakeholders, it was confirmed that clear cooperation between flood resilience and urban design practices at the neighbourhood level does not yet exist.
Composite indicators are synthetic indices of individual indicators and are increasingly being used to rank countries in various performance and policy areas. Using composites, countries have been compared with regard to their competitiveness, innovative abilities, degree of globalisation and environmental sustainability. Composite indicators are useful in their ability to integrate large amounts of information into easily understood formats and are valued as a communication and political tool. However, the construction of composites suffers from many methodological difficulties, with the result that they can be misleading and easily manipulated. This paper reviews the steps in constructing composite indicators and their inherent weaknesses. A detailed statistical example is given in a case study. The paper also offers suggestions on how to improve the transparency and use of composite indicators for analytical and policy purposes ...
In France, as in the rest of Europe, river floods have been increasing in frequency
and severity, there are more and more instances of rivers bursting their banks,
aggravating the impact of the flooding of areas supposedly protected by flood
defenses. These circumstances oblige us to manage flood risk by integrating new
concepts like urban resilience design. Definitively, our goal is to reduce flood
risk by managing vulnerability issues of flooded areas to achieve flood resilient
cities. A first analysis of city needs of decision-making tools showed that no
tools to prioritize recovery actions are available. This tool needs to integrate
some models and indicators to be efficient: an urban systemic model of the city;
resilience indicators; failure and recovery scenarios. A first prototype sketch was
designed but it needs to integrate these models and indicators. That is why, as
part of a future PhD thesis, this tool will be developed to be used directly by
decision makers and communities.
Keywords: resilience, GIS, indicators, urban systemic model, urban networks,
safety methods.
1 Introduction
In France, as in Europe, river floods have been increasing in frequency and
severity [1] and there are more instances of rivers bursting their banks,
aggravating the impact of the flooding of areas supposedly protected by flood
defenses. Moreover, climate change is expected to exacerbate the frequency and
intensity of hydro meteorological disaster [2]. Despite efforts made to maintain
the flood defense assets, we often observe levee failures leading to finally
increase flood risk in protected area. Furthermore, flood forecasting models,
although benefiting continuous improvements, remain partly inaccurate due to
Vulnerability and resilience are two concepts which have emerged successively to analyze and characterize risks. The concept of vulnerability was the dominant paradigm in risk assessment. Since the 2000s, resilience is appearing in geography and urban planning especially since the concept of vulnerability is showing some limits in understanding risks. To exist, the concept of resilience has evolved to become a more operational concept in urban risk analysis. This paper emphasizes the semantic shift that has occurred between vulnerability and resilience. Its purpose is to analyze why the concept of resilience is imposing itself. Through database analysis, we highlight that the use of this concept is limited till the mid 2000s and then is diffused rapidly. Then, we will try to formulate hypotheses to explain the semantic shift from vulnerability to resilience. Finally, we will emphasize the risk of instrumentalisation of the concept of resilience by urban planning actors.
Resilience appears to have become a buzz word since the ecological, psychological, social and economic sciences began to use it to refer, respectively, to the capacity of ecosystems, people, societies, the economy, and more recently even urban systems to cope with disturbance. In fact, it is unclear exactly what the catchword «resilient city» means. Based on these assumptions, this article reviews resilience perspectives and their possible application to urban systems. In the first part of the paper, the concept of resilience, its evolution and perspectives (from engineering to social ecology) are analyzed with reference to ecosystems, societies and complex systems. In the second part we try to shed light on this panacea of concepts applied to cities. Important insights of this review are that certain resilience engineering perspectives (such as recovery and persistence views) can lead to unsustainable patterns of development in cities, while from complex systems resilience perspectives the principles of sustainability and transformability emerge as the consequent and necessary trajectory. While the term «resilient cities» often refers only to the capacity to maintain functions and structures, we argue that urban resilience should be framed within the resilience (system persistence), transition (system incremental change) and transformation (system reconfiguration) views.
Vulnerability to natural hazards has many components. It is about exposure to various natural disasters, but a place’s vulnerability also depends on its capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from shocks resulting from natural extreme events. To avoid increased place vulnerability due to the anticipated negative effects of climate change, local authorities need to know which places are the most vulnerable and what makes these areas vulnerable. We have developed ViewExposed to provide this information. Knowing where the most vulnerable areas are is very useful for local stakeholders, since these places may be most in need of adaptation strategies. However, stakeholders also need to have an understanding of what makes these areas vulnerable. ViewExposed provides this information using a parallel coordinates plot, a table view, sparklines, and a profile report. Although vulnerability assessment data are complex, ViewExposed has an easy-to-use interface facilitating a high degree of user interaction through multiple and linked views. An improved understanding of the many aspects of vulnerability has a far-reaching potential to inform users efficiently
about factors that influence the overall vulnerability and, as a consequence, can help raise people’s awareness of what makes places vulnerable to natural threats.
In Europe, river floods have been increasing in frequency and severity.
These circumstances require the management of flood risk by integrating
new concepts like urban resilience. Nevertheless, urban resilience seems
to have no accurate meanings. That is why researchers are primarily
concerned with defining resilience. Nevertheless, focus on research
object seems to be more important than focus on conceptual debate
(Resilience of what? Rather than what is resilience?). Thus the
methodology designed here is focused on urban considerations. In fact, a
system approach emphasizes technical networks' importance concerning
urban resilience. Principles and assumptions applied in this research
finally lead to the analysis of how urban networks are able to face
natural hazards. In this context, a Web-GIS has been developed for
analyzing resistance capacity, absorption capacity and recovery capacity
of different technical networks. A first application has been carried
out on a French agglomeration in order to analyze road network
absorption capacity. This application is very specific but, thanks to
this example, it is already possible to highlight the methodology's
usefulness.
Social vulnerability indices have emerged over the past decade as quantitative measures of the social dimensions of natural hazards vulnerability. But how reliable are the index rankings? Validation of indices with external reference data has posed a persistent challenge in large part because social vulnerability is multidimensional and not directly observable. This article applies global sensitivity analyses to internally validate the methods used in the most common social vulnerability index designs: deductive, hierarchical, and inductive. Uncertainty analysis is performed to assess the robustness of index ranks when reasonable alternative index configurations are modeled. The hierarchical design was found to be the most accurate, while the inductive model was the most precise. Sensitivity analysis is employed to understand which decisions in the vulnerability index construction process have the greatest influence on the stability of output rankings. The deductive index ranks are found to be the most sensitive to the choice of transformation method, hierarchical models to the selection of weighting scheme, and inductive indices to the indicator set and scale of analysis. Specific recommendations for each stage of index construction are provided so that the next generation of social vulnerability indices can be developed with a greater degree of transparency, robustness, and reliability.
Infrastructure for water, urban drainage and flood protection has a typical lifetime of 30–200 years and its continuing performance is very sensitive to climate change. Investment decisions for such systems are frequently based on state-of-the-art impact assessments using a specified climate change scenario in order to identify a singular optimal adaptive strategy. In a non-stationary world, however, it is risky and/or uneconomic to plan for just one climate change scenario as an average or best estimate, as is done with the use of the Predict-Then-Adapt method. We argue that responsible adaptation requires an alternative method that effectively allows for the lack of knowledge about future climate change by adopting a managed/adaptive strategy. The managed/adaptive strategy confers the ability, derived from built-in flexibility, to adjust to future uncertainties as they unfold. This will restrict the effect of erroneous decisions and help avoid maladaptation. Real In Options (RIO) analysis can facilitate the development of an optimal managed/adaptive strategy to climate change. Here, we show the economic benefits of adopting a managed/adaptive strategy and building in flexibility, using RIO analysis applied for the first time to urban drainage infrastructure.
In recent years, resilience engineering has been given considerable attention among safety researchers and analysts. The area represents a new way of thinking about safety. Whereas conventional risk management approaches are based on hindsight knowledge, failure reporting and risk assessments calculating historical data-based probabilities, resilience engineering looks for ways to enhance the ability of organisations to be resilient in the sense that they recognise, adapt to and absorb variations, changes, disturbances, disruptions and surprises. The implications of this shift in thinking are many. We focus in this paper on the understanding of the risk concept and how risk can be assessed and treated. The traditional ways of looking at risk are not suitable for use in resilience engineering, but other risk perspectives exist. A main purpose of this paper is to draw attention to such perspectives, in particular one category of perspectives where probability is replaced by uncertainty in the definition of risk. We argue that the basic ideas of resilience engineering can be supported by such risk perspectives.
In disaster science, policy and practice, the transition of resilience from a descriptive concept to a normative agenda provides challenges and opportunities. This paper argues that both are needed to increase resilience. We briefly outline the concept and several recent international resilience-building efforts to elucidate critical questions and less-discussed issues. We highlight the need to move resilience thinking forward by emphasizing structural social-political processes, acknowledging and acting on differences between ecosystems and societies, and looking beyond the quantitative streamlining of resilience into one index. Instead of imposing a technical-reductionist framework, we suggest a starting basis of integrating different knowledge types and experiences to generate scientifically reliable, context-appropriate and socially robust resilience-building activities.
The behaviour of the urban network infrastructures, and their interactions during flood events, will have direct and indirect consequences on the flood risk level in the built environment. By urban network infrastructures we include all the urban technical networks like transportation, energy, water supply, waste water, telecommunication… able to spread the flood risk in cities, qualified as critical infrastructures due to their major roles for modern living standards. From history, most of cities in the world have been built close to coast lines or to river to beneficiate this means of communication and trade. Step by step, to avoid being flooded, defences like levees have been built. The capacity of the levees to retain the floods depends on their conditions, their performance level and the capacity of the authorities to well maintain these infrastructures. But recent history shows the limits of a flood risk management strategy focused on protection, leading to levee breaks these last twenty years, for example in the South of France. Then, in case of levee break, cities will be flooded. The urban technical networks, due to the way they have been designed, their conditions and their locations in the city, will play a major role in the diffusion of the flood extent. Also, the flood risk will have consequences in some not flooded neighbourhoods due to networks collapses and complex interdependencies. This chapter describes some methods to design spatial decision support systems in that context.
The overall resilience of modern societies is largely determined by and dependent on resilience of their critical infrastructures (CI). These infrastructures are becoming increasingly smarter and more efficient by means of smart technologies such as sensors, gateways, processors. The use of smart technologies also makes the CIs increasingly interdependent and vulnerable to various hazards. CI resilience against threats, such as cyber-attacks, terrorist attacks, natural hazards, is pivotal to ensure continued operations and well-being of the society. To achieve this goal, understanding and measuring the resilience of the CI is of key importance. The main objective of the current research agenda is to improve existing approaches by providing an innovative “holistic” methodology for assessing resilience of smart critical infrastructures. The methodology proposed here, as part of the SmartResilience project, is based on resilience indicators (RIs), and it is structured in six levels (RIs, issues, phases, threats, CIs, and area/city) to obtain a measurement of the CI resilience within an area such as a city. The methodology helps understand “how resilient the CIs are against particular threats” and “what measures could help improve their resilience.” Furthermore, the chapter also provides first results of the implementation in sample case studies. This methodology is expected to be useful to visualize, trend, and benchmark the resilience at regular intervals, contributing to resilience management of smart critical infrastructures.
Providers of urban critical infrastructures are often relying on indicator-based approaches for resilience management. While science is developing more and more intelligent resilience indicators, the application and interpretation of such indicators might lead to new challenges and questions. Since models always reduce the complexity of real world systems, users of the developed indicators need to understand the underlying assumptions. Otherwise, simplifications may lead to misinterpretations and severe consequences for the infrastructure providers and the society. In this chapter the authors discuss the difficulties related to the development and usage of resilience indictors and present relevant quality criteria for their evaluation and selection. Additionally, proper resilience assessment requires expert skills and an advanced knowledge and competence profile. Bloom’s learning taxonomy provides the theoretical underpinning which may be used to develop such profiles.
Due to persistent and serious threats from natural disasters around the globe, many have turned to resilience and vulnerability research to guide disaster preparation, recovery, and adaptation decisions. In response, scholars and practitioners have put forth a variety of disaster indices, based on quantifiable metrics, to gauge levels of resilience and vulnerability. However, few indices are empirically validated using observed disaster impacts and, as a result, it is often unclear which index should be preferred for each decision at hand. Thus, we compare and empirically validate five of the top U.S. disaster indices, including three resilience indices and two vulnerability indices. We use observed disaster losses, fatalities, and disaster declarations from the southeastern United States to empirically validate each index. We find that disaster indices, though thoughtfully substantiated by literature and theoretically persuasive, are not all created equal. While four of the five indices perform as predicted in explaining damages, only three explain fatalities and only two explain disaster declarations as expected by theory. These results highlight the need for disaster indices to clearly state index objectives and structure underlying metrics to support validation of the results based on these goals. Further, policymakers should use index results carefully when developing regional policy or investing in resilience and vulnerability improvement projects.
In this article we present the design and implementation of the web-based visualization tool VisAdapt, developed to support homeowners in the Nordic countries to assess anticipated climate change and climate related risks which are expected to negatively impact their living conditions. The tool guides the user through a three-step visual exploration process to facilitate the exploration of risks and adaptation measures, specifically adapted to the user. VisAdapt has been developed over the course of two years in close collaboration with domain experts and end users to ensure the validity of the included data and the efficiency of the visual interface. Although VisAdapt is designed for Nordic homeowners, the insights gained from the development process and the lessons learned from the project could be valuable to researchers in a wide area of application domains.
On-going changes in cities caused by rapid urbanisation and climate change have increased both the flood probability and the severity of flooding. Consequently, there is a need for all cities to adapt to climate and socio-economic changes by developing new strategies for flood risk management. The following risk paradigm shifts from traditional to more integrated approaches, since one of the main emerging tasks for city managers is the development of resilient cities. The concept of resilience is becoming more and more important, despite the many challenges that interfere with its implementation. The goal of this research is to create knowledge on how to operationalise flood resilience at the neighbourhood level through neighbourhood design. A research approach was used and a qualitative analysis tool, the DS3 model, was developed in order to study a particular neighbourhood of HafenCity, in Hamburg. Results show that design measures involving transportation infrastructure, land use (open public spaces) and buildings have been the main contributions to the flood resilience of the neighbourhood. © 2016 The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Hurricane Katrina was an extraordinarily powerful and deadly hurricane that created catastrophic damage and inflicted large loss of life. The complex genesis of Katrina involved the interaction of a tropical wave, the middle tropospheric remnants of Tropical Depression Ten, and an upper tropospheric trough. Katrina generated an intense burst of deep convection over the low level center during the afternoon of August 25, 2005, while positioned over the northwestern Bahamas. It made it first appearance in the US as a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane scale, with maximum sustained winds of 70 knots, near the border of Miami-Dade County and Broward County. A precise measurement of the storm surge produced by Katrina along the northern Gulf Coast is complicated by many factors, including the widespread failures of tide gauges. Estimates of the insured property losses by Katrina ranges between $20 billion and $60 billion.
Human societies and territories have always been confronted with hazards and risks, which are occasionally the source of disasters. Over the last 30 years, research on risks and disasters has greatly increased and focused on the vulnerability and resilience of societies. Resilience is often presented as an antonym of vulnerability, but in fact, the relationships are somewhat more complex. This paper adresses one of the chal-lenges for research today - that of understanding the relationships established between the concepts of vulne-rability and resilience. In order to understand these relationships, we propose a conceptual model of Resilien-cery Vulnerability. This model is based on current knowledge of the risk and disaster domain. But although resilience is often presented as a sort of ultimate aim, we see things differently. The notion of Resiliencery Vulnerability expresses the idea that vulnerability is not necessarily a concept with a negative connotation and resilience a concept with a positive connotation.
The concept of urban resilience has taken a leading edge by incorporating the multiscalar interactions within an urban system, revealing the short- and long-term impacts, spatial dependencies, and inequalities. The issue now is to enable local authorities and urban stakeholders to grasp and apply the resilience approach. Technical networks and urban services supporting urban development (drinking water supply, public transportation, etc.) are an interesting case study to apply the resilience concept. The urban resilience approach, tested with the managers of service provision in the City of Paris, demonstrates the effectiveness of integration and collaboration. First, an autodiagnosis realized with each manager identifies the service dependencies and its capacity for continuous operation in case of disturbance. Then workshops raise manager awareness of their interdependencies and feed the discussion toward technical and organizational solutions in an integrated approach. This macroscopic analysis is then completed by a territorial assessment of urban service resilience. In doing so, the spatial and temporal dimensions emphasize gaps but also margins of manoeuver in managing resilient urban services. Our results show that manager strategies can be focused on protection, adaptation, or recovery of their service. However, these are sometimes contradictory and threaten the resilience of the whole system. Indeed, in highlighting the different strategies set up by managers, the region's resilience can be discussed at different scales: the urban service, the system of urban services, the City of Paris, and the Parisian metropolis. Then we emphasize the difficulties in applying the resilience concept and suggest solutions to improve the conditions for urban resilience and sustainability.
There is increasing policy and research interest in disaster resilience, yet the extant literature is still mired in definitional debates, epistemological orientations of researchers, and differences in basic approaches to measurement. As a consequence, there is little integration across domains and disciplines on community resilience assessment, its driving forces, and geographic variability. Using US counties as the study unit, this paper creates an empirically-based resilience metric called the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) that is both conceptually and theoretically sound, yet, easy enough to compute for use in a policy context. A common set of variables were used to measure the inherent resilience of counties in the United States according to six different domains or capitals as identified in the extant literature – social, economic, housing and infrastructure, institutional, community, and environmental. Data were from public and freely accessible data sources. Counties in the US Midwest and Great Plains states have the most inherent resilience, while counties in the west, along the US-Mexico border, and along the Appalachian ridge in the east contain the least resilience. Further, it was found that inherent resilience is not the opposite of social vulnerability, but a distinctly different construct both conceptually and empirically. While understanding the overall variability in resilience, the BRIC is easily deconstructed to its component parts to provide guidance to policy makers on where investments in intervention strategies may make a difference in the improvement of scores. Such evidence-based research has an opportunity to influence public policy focused on disaster risk.
