Flood Risk Mitigation: The Sociotechnical Dimensions
The rising frequency and severity of floods and flood-related disasters, which on the one hand can be attributed to factors that relate to natural phenomena and on the other hand to factors that result from human activities, show dramatically that our current, primarily technocratic approach to controlling such events with infrastructural measures cannot provide adequate solutions. Much of the available literature is limited by taking a narrow view on floods by concentrating on the technical aspects, while ignoring the societal and some other aspects that can, and often do affect the impact of such events. Among these aspects are those of access to knowledge and information, participation in the decision making process and the manner in which the resources for flood mitigation are addressed and distributed. This book is our response to the rising significance of the subject matter and it is directed to promoting a specifically hydroinformatics viewpoint of how to approach the flood risk mitigation process.
Content Table
- Flood Risk Mitigation: The Sociotechnical Dimensions
- Introduction
- From an "economically efficient flood defence" to a "socially just flood risk mitigation"
- Hydroinformatics and flood risk mitigation
- Audience
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Drivers of urban flood risk
- 3. Urban drainage systems and asset management
- 4. Data acquisition and processing
- 5. Modelling floods in urban areas
- 6. Flood risk assessment
- 7. Flood protection measures
- 8. Flood risk communication
- 9. Emergency management
- 10. Active stakeholder involvement and institutional arrangements
- 11. Decision support for flood risk mitigation
- 12. Towards flood resilient societies
- 13. Appendix
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Introduction
Urban communities across the world, as these continue to grow from North to South and from East to West, are nowadays experiencing some of the worst floods in living memory, and indeed on record. The human and social consequences of such events highlight the position of flooding as the most deadly and destructive of all natural disasters. Correspondingly, the process of flood risk reduction and the social and institutional responses to such events present an immense challenge, and then not only to planners, engineers and scientists but to urban societies as a whole. Since flood disasters can cause death, disease, loss of property and goods, disruption of community life, pollution of receiving waters and impacts on the health of the ecosystem, enormous investments are made annually on the implementation of various measures to reduce losses and minimise negative impacts. However, the resources that are available at the city level are often limited, and the task of setting up priorities, so that even making the right choices so as to achieve some measure of "distributive justice" in the allocation of flood protection funds is already a difficult, and in many cases unachievable, task.
In line with the above observations and given the knowable uncertainties and institutional complexities which concern the management of urban drainage infrastructure and surrounding water bodies, it becomes obvious that urban flood risk mitigation requires multiple approaches and disciplines and the aim of this book is to cover a range of aspects concerning both social and technical issues that can provide, if properly executed, states of social justice. The book introduces the notion of social justice in the context of what has commonly been referred to as urban flood risk management, but then in a context in which management itself is placed directly in the hands of the most active stakeholders rather than being in the hands of what have so far passed as "professional managers".
The authors argue that a commitment to achieving socially just urban flood risk reduction within a distributed group of self-managing active stakeholders is an imperative for distributing risk responsibility fairly and enabling an equal recognition of different social groups (including those which are the most vulnerable), giving them equal rights in the decision making process.
From an "economically efficient flood defence" to a "socially just flood risk mitigation"
The policy framework within which urban flood-related decisions are made has undergone a significant transformation over the past two decades. The previous policy had been dominated almost exclusively by the implementation of structural flood defence measures which have been selected on the basis of their "economic efficiency" as relativised against some predefined flood protection standards. It is now widely recognised that to achieve sustainable policies for flood risk mitigation, structural measures also need to be supported by a number of non-structural elements of a kind that, although they have been realised in some important applications, have so far been insufficiently analysed and have consequently been even less understood. Thus, the flood risk mitigation framework must be nowadays concerned not only with protecting from floods but also with understanding flood risk, preparing for flood risk and knowing how to live with flood risk.
A special feature of this book is correspondingly that it attempts to address the sociotechnical dimensions of urban flooding and flood risk not only in the context of "developed" but also so-called "developing" countries. In this so much greater part of the world, where the sizes of its cities are increasing at a much faster rate than in the "developed" world, whereby the problems of urban flooding are also rapidly becoming so much greater and their solutions correspondingly so much more urgent, the problems that have to be solved are so much greater correspondingly.
The book challenges the notions of sustainability and equity, such as are nowadays used quite extensively within the available flood risk management literature of the "developed" world, by reposing the question of what constitute just, fair and equitable flood risk mitigation, and then especially within a "developing world" context. This book accordingly discusses these and some other related aspects and it suggests that the present practice should adopt the principles of social justice and incorporate such aspects as the fair distribution of resources for flood mitigation, the recognition of the rights of all parties (including minorities and other disadvantaged groups) to participate in decision making processes, the empowerment of individuals and groups and indeed the acceptance of processes of active stakeholder participation throughout the entire flood risk mitigation process.
Hydroinformatics and flood risk mitigation
This is the second book in a series of Urban Hydroinformatics books and it is concerned with the transformation of urban flood assessment culture from a ‘techno-economic’ one to a ‘socio-technical’ one, that is, one that extends the technical aspects into their more general social environments. It is noted that the primary role of hydroinformatics within the subject of urban flood risk mitigation is in the development of the necessary social and technical arrangements that can achieve socially just distributions of benefits and burdens of flood risk for present and future generations.
The book examines different drivers of urban flood risk and it focuses on the way in which social and technical aspects are understood and introduced, from the planning and design stages of urban drainage assets, through their construction, operation and rehabilitation, to early warning and disaster risk reduction activities. The issues such as data collection and processing, instantiation of numerical models, analyses of hazards and vulnerabilities and stakeholder participation within the decision making processes are also discussed.
Audience
Although this book has been written mainly as a text book for post-graduate students who have a strong interest in Hydroinformatics as applied to urban flooding and flood risk reduction in its broadest sense, it should also appeal to practising engineers and researchers who are involved in the design, modelling and decision support, who will find it useful as a reference. The book uses examples from real-world case studies to support and demonstrate the key issues explained in the text. A DVD is available from UNESCO-IHE to complement the book and it contains exercise materials and video lectures given by the authors and other contributors.
In outline, the following chapters are contained in the book:
1. Introduction
In this opening chapter we go some way towards explaining the roots of urban flood risk, describing the evolution of flood mitigation practices, defining the notions of risk and vulnerability and introducing social justice as a new dimension within the process of urban flood risk mitigation. The special attribute of risk, that it is a function of the knowledge of risk, is introduced. Such aspects are discussed from the sociotechnical point of view in which social issues cannot be separated from technical issues because of the natural relations existing between human beings and technology: human beings shape their natural and economic environments and in turn these environments play a major role in shaping technology by creating ongoing positive feedback cycles. Some of the aspects covered in this chapter are: justice in theory and practice, justice in flood risk mitigation, risk as a function of knowledge of hazard and vulnerability, vulnerability as a function of the inner and outer worlds of human cognisance, vulnerability as a function of physical and socio-economic environments, issues facing 'developing' countries, issues facing 'developed' countries, the role of hydroinformatics, etc.
2. Drivers of urban flood risk
The drivers of urban flood risk can be traced and analysed from different perspectives. This chapter examines different drivers of urban flood risk and discusses a wide range of issues such as geographical and historical characteristics of cities, their urbanisation and population growth, climate and rainfall characteristics, flood types, technological and infrastructure issues as well as societal and cultural aspects.
3. Urban drainage systems and asset management
This chapter describes different types of urban drainage systems, their characteristics and components. It also goes into the theory and practice of urban drainage asset management and the use of optimisation techniques for the evaluation of system improvement measures. Some of the key aspects covered in this chapter are: minor/major, above-ground/below-ground, open/closed, manmade and natural systems (SUDS), asset management principles, risk assessment, condition, performance, criticality, lifecycle costing, optimisation methods and optimal decision making, etc.
Figure 1: Asset management cycle.
4. Data acquisition and processing
This chapter describes various aspects of data collection, processing and management activities and it aims to provide an overview on some of the main principles and issues that should be considered when designing a data collection programme to support flood risk assessment process. It covers not only the collection and processing of flow, water level and rainfall data but also acquisition of remote sensing data, filtering of important features from raw LiDAR data, use of GPS, internet and wireless technologies, SCADA and Telemetry systems, Real Time Control, etc.
Figure 2: Collection of data by remote sensing technologies.
5. Modelling floods in urban areas
This chapter covers some of the key theoretical as well as practical aspects of the urban flood modelling process. It covers different forms of models and modelling approaches and their key aspects.
Figure 3: Urban flood modelling
6. Flood risk assessment
This chapter introduces the flood risk assessment framework as a paradigm shift from quantification and analysis of hazards and their potential economic consequences to a more qualitative assessment of flood risk from the much broader sociotechnical point of view. Such a framework is needed to ascertain the nature of the problems and how to evaluate risk using quantitative and qualitative measures. Various aspects such as knowledge and perception of risk, the nature of flood hazards, exposure, resilience and vulnerability are discussed. This chapter also reviews the ways of approaching estimation of flood hazards and vulnerability. Different dimensions of vulnerability are presented and discussed.
7. Flood protection measures
This chapter gives an overview of various conventional and natural, structural and non-structural measures that can be applied to different kinds of floods and flood-related problems
Figure 4: Stormwater detention pond.
8. Flood risk communication
This chapter stresses the role of science, technology, and the media in the communication of flood risks, warnings and disaster risk alerts. This chapter also discusses how the results of numerical models can be communicated to the end-user community, including emergency management organisations and the general public.
Figure 5: Flood early warning system.
9. Emergency management
This chapter describes both theoretical and practical aspects of how to prepare for disaster before it occurs, how to respond during disasters (e.g., emergency evacuation, etc.), and how to support, and rebuild society after disaster has occurred. It connects to all previously covered aspects for formulation of strategies for flood disaster prevention, mitigation, response and recovery.
10. Active stakeholder involvement and institutional arrangements
This chapter discusses the role of stakeholder participation within the flood risk mitigation process. The general purpose of stakeholder participation within this context is to induce a change in the built environment that aligns with a positive change in the social environment. When this social change is not realised in the case of infrastructural projects, the process of attempting to transform the built environment often suffers accordingly. The purpose of stakeholder participation within the social environment itself is to transform it from a reactive one to an interactive one. In a reactive social environment, each stakeholder reacts individually to a technical change solely on the basis of the most immediate social consequences for that individual. In an interactive environment, stakeholders interact with others in their community and start to cooperate in forming and shaping the technical change, making it an essentially socio-technical transformation.
11. Decision support for flood risk mitigation
Decision support systems are necessary within the urban flood risk mitigation process as this process is multifaceted and requires such systems to foster cooperation and assist the active stakeholder decision makers. The chapter discusses the role of decision support systems within hydroinformatics environments and it describes the key components of such systems.
12. Towards flood resilient societies
In this chapter, we go into the discussion of key actions for vulnerability reduction. The focus is here on what can or should individuals and social groups do to reduce their own vulnerability when situated within suitable hydroinformatics environments, and how external actors can best work with these developments at the individual or group level in order to build resilient societies.
13. Appendix
An essay will be appended outlining the philosophical and theological backgrounds to the development described earlier in the main body of the work. Since these deal with matters that are unlikely to be familiar to present-day practising engineers in many parts of the world, even as they are essential to any understanding of the processes that are described in the main body of this work, they are written at a reasonably accessible level that connect present-day situations and experiences to their foundations in related fields.
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The issues in this article refer to the book:
Flood Risk and Social Justice: From Quantitative to Qualitative Flood Risk Assessment and Mitigation
Authors: Zoran Vojinovic and Michael B. Abbott, IWA Publishing, 2012
To order your copy of the book, CLICK HERE.
