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Procedia Engineering 154 (2016) 811 – 817

12th International Conference on Hydroinformatics, HIC 2016

Resilience in Flood Risk Management - A New Communication

Tool
Jelena Baticaa, Philippe Gourbesvillea*
a
Nice Sophia-Antipolis University / Polytech Nice-Sophia / Innovative City lab URE 005, 930 Route des Colles, 06903 Sophia Antipolis, France

Abstract

Natural hazards, floods especially nowadays stand as the most frequent one posing huge damages to urban
environment and urban communities. The need to reshape existing urban systems and make them able to accept a
certain level of disturbance becomes important. Knowing that urban systems have dynamic characteristic and that
the changes are visible on daily level regarding new technologies brings a different light to evaluation of flood
vulnerability and flood resilience. New trends and more sophisticated assets are not designed to accept disturbance
of natural hazards, at least not all of them. This puts evaluation of flood resilience and flood vulnerability as one of
focal factors in process of reshaping build environment, reducing vulnerability, preparing urban communities to
accept flooding and to create flood friendly environment. Introduction of a new concept to stakeholders stand as a
challenge for flood professionals. A developed tool enables evaluation of flood resilience index for whole urban
system. Beside the build environment, stakeholders need education and organization. Proposed presentation enables
better communication with the key stakeholders. This paper focuses on analysis of urban systems in Europe and in
Asia. The method is a research outcome obtained within projects CORFU and PEARL (www.corfu7.eu;
http://www.pearl-fp7.eu/). The research focuses also on examination of present flood management strategies and
their effectiveness in decreasing flood damage and evaluation of flood resilience.
©©2016
2016Published by Elsevier
The Authors. Ltd. This
Published is an open
by Elsevier access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
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(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of HIC 2016.
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of HIC 2016
Keywords: flood resilience, natural hazard, risk communication, stakeholder engagement

1877-7058 © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of HIC 2016
doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2016.07.411
812 Jelena Batica and Philippe Gourbesville / Procedia Engineering 154 (2016) 811 – 817

1. Introduction

On the list of most frequent natural hazard, floods come on the first place [1]. Even so, the urban communities are
not always ready to accept the flooding and to cope with the consequences. The level of damages caused by floods
increase [2] and function of existing structural measures does not provide acceptable protection.
The vulnerability of urban communities becomes important in process of analysis of possible strategies for
reduction of flood risks. By definition, vulnerability is the extent to which a system is susceptible to floods due to
exposure, a perturbation, in conjunction with its ability (or inability) to cope, recover, or adapt [3].
Consequently, the resilience concept is taking a main role in this process due to the approach that is defining
disturbance level of system as a whole to sustain stable during and after flooding. Here, under system both physical
and social components are in play. Resilience term is often left open to debate and doesn’t have a general or
consensual definition although it is increasingly used in integrated urban drainage management, [4,5,6,7,8,9]. The
diverse interpretations of resilience reflect the complexity of this concept. This makes ‘difficult’ implementation of
resilience in integrated urban drainage management.
From a general perspective, resilience represents the capacity of an urban system or community exposed to
hazard to adapt by resisting or changing in order to reach an acceptable level of functioning, organization and
structure [10].
Discussion about resilience need to underline the term specified resilience with following questions: 'resilient of
what?' and 'up to what level?' ” [11]. We are presenting specified resilience in this paper. Flood resilience defines
acceptable level of flooding that urban system can tolerate e.g. system is able to function during and after flooding.
This means that is possible to state that urban system is resilient to flooding processing up to some level.
The resilient urban systems and urban communities should have ability to accept, resist, recover and learn from
the events. Capacity of urban systems and communities is improved in each part of the flood risk management
(FRM) cycle. It covers actions related to preparedness, response and recovery. Within this research the five elements
of flood risk management are developed: Reflect, Relief, Resist, Response, and Recovery. These new elements
generate a new FRM cycle:

Figure 1: Defined elements for flood risk management cycle – CORFU project [13]

The concept of resilience is interpreted within the flood risk management framework [13]. Developed method
present categorization of flood effect under scope of resilience with urban functions and services and quantify flood
resilience with definition of Flood Resilience Index (FRI).
Further, the eight case study areas are analyzed and for each the flood resilience index is presented. The
importance of results is discussed with the last two section of this paper.
Development of FRI started under FP7 Projects CORFU and PEARL. Here, the focus is on the results from eight
case study areas and their usability.
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2. Methodology

Starting point under developed methodology is on urban system. The evaluation of FRI focuses on both micro
and macro scale. The evaluation on micro scale takes into account urban functions and services as main elements.
They will not be presented within this paper. However, the FRI evaluation on macro scale is in the focus. The urban
system and its flood resilience is presented through five dimensions: social, economic, institutional, physical and
natural. These five dimensions describe the physical and social attributes of urban system. The evaluation is done
with set of indicators that are grouped under dimensions. The developed matrix for evaluation has 91 indicators.
The matrix is created within Excel table so it is easy for computation. The statistical method chosen for evaluation is
aggregate weighted mean index (AWMI) method [12]. Constructions of a rating scale with weights for all variables
need to be done using weighted indexes. The calculated averaged WMI of one dimension is the Flood Resilience
Index (FRI) for that dimension. Rating scales corresponds to very low, low, medium, and high respectively. The
scale is presented in the table below.

Table 1: Scales for Flood Resilience Index [13]

Very low The activities are not clear and coherent in an overall flood risk management (5R). Awareness is very low on the issues and
motivation to address them. Interventions have a short-term character. Actions limited to crisis response.
0-2

Low Awareness of the issues and motivation to address them exist. Capacity building of human resources remains limited.
2-3 Capacity to act is improved and substantial. Interventions are more numerous and long-term. Development and
implementation of solutions.
Medium Integration and implementation of solutions is higher. Interventions are extensive, covering all main aspects of the
3-4 ‘problem’, and they are linked within a coherent long-term strategy.

High A ‘‘culture of safety’’ exists among all stakeholders, where the resilience concept is embedded in all relevant policies,
planning, practice, attitudes and behaviour.
4-5

Social dimension explore available resources, health status, knowledge and flexibility as well as connections
within the community. Economic dimension define increase of households in line with population growth rates,
employment as direct link to economic growth of area and triggers urban growth. These indicators in economic
dimension imply that long-term benefits of planning policies, disaster management and mitigation plans are
important tools for increasing resilience and reducing losses.
Institutional dimension takes into account existence of flood management plans, policies, regulations, evacuation
plans. A schematic presentation on the figure below shows structure of the method.

Figure 2: Schematic presentation of FRI evaluation of macro scale [13]

814 Jelena Batica and Philippe Gourbesville / Procedia Engineering 154 (2016) 811 – 817

A set of indicators within physical dimension evaluate existing structural measures protection, communication
network (telephone, internet, transport, etc), human safety (ex. emergency shelter), etc.
Finally, natural dimension describes the space where urban area is located with different ranges for variables:
available water bodies, percentage of existing slope or flat areas, drainage capabilities, etc.

3. Results and discussion

As announced for this research eight case study areas are considered. They are located in Europe and in Asia. They
all have different flooding patterns and existing FRM. For following cities the FRI is evaluated:
x Barcelona, Spain
x Beijing, China
x Genoa, Italy
x Hamburg, Germany
x Nice, France
x Châtelaillon-Plage, France
x Rethymno, Greece.
x Taipei, Thaiwan

A case study teams filled the developed matrix evaluating 91 indicators. For the cases where indicator does not
existing the assigned value is 0. The weighting process focuses on fact that for the indicators with high importance
the assigned weight is 5 and for the less important indicator the weight value assigned is 1. As evaluation of flood
resilience is at the end of very complex analysis, before completing the matrix the following analysis are done:
x for every city a flooding event is chosen for analysis
x based on the event characteristics a flood map is generated
x from local case studies the data regarding social, economic, natural, institutional and physical characteristics that
corresponds to indicators in the matrix are included.

In each case study area, a team of project partners filled the matrix following the steps described in the previous
section. The results are presented in the figures below. For each case study area there is a value of FRI.
 Jelena Batica and Philippe Gourbesville / Procedia Engineering 154 (2016) 811 – 817 815

Figure 3: Result of FRI evaluation for macro scale for different case study areas

The values of FRI for case study areas vary from 1.17 to 4.27. Based on description in table 1 there is a urban
community (Rethymno) with FRI=1.17 which indicate that awareness is low and there is not functional FRM
framework and inhabitants are not aware of existing flood risks. On the other side the Hamburg with value of
FRI=4.27 stand s as a flood resilient city with significant level of community awareness and ability to cope with
floods. These results should be interpreted separately taking into account each dimension and its contribution in
evaluation process. Following that the and looking into presented diagrams the value of FRI can be increased if
social awareness is changed, then existence of volunteer programs, etc. Also, institutional element in the urban
system as a very important since they give a framework for all actions necessary for increase flood resilience.
This is a useful tool in the process of stakeholder engagement. Stakeholders engage process involve in response
to the government and its decision to achieve better efficiency in flood risk management decision making process.
The rise of community engagement looks for a rethinking of how the view of stakeholder can be much better
involved in decision making. This tool provides better understanding of flood risks to key stakeholders. It is very
clear presented an influence of different components that are creating urban system. Also, it is very easy to map the
priorities in rising flood resilience of a urban system.
A stakeholder is defined as any individual, social, or economic group or institution that is effected by the decision
or it can influence the decision process. Due to diversity of social, economic and institutional dimensions within
case study areas different stakeholders are identified.
A stakeholder participation process is a complex. The differences between stakeholders and their interest within
flood risk management planning do exist. The engagement process of different stakeholders considers participation
and consultation. These two terms are describing stakeholder participation process. Participation of stakeholders is
the involvement in decision making process or actions within decision making process. Further, the stakeholder
participation can be (i) direct and (ii) indirect.
The direct participation refers to the situation where stakeholders are engaged within decision making process.
The indirect participation refers to the situation where third party is making the decision on behalf of stakeholders.
As a result, there are different levels of stakeholder presentation.
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4. Conclusion

Flood Resilience Index is based on the ability to objectively assess all defined indicators. The outcome indicators
are defined from actions in flood risk management cycle. The flood resilience index still depends on some
assumptions. The proposed measurement of indicators relies on weights (assigned for each indicator) that can’t be
defined in absolute values. However, the possibility to implement the approach under a participative process which
allows choosing representatives values, can integrate the dynamic vision which is needed for the urban planning
actions. Some limitations related to providing a quality measure of the process are possible since weights are used to
intensify the scores in the assessment.
The flood resilience concept brings a new philosophy to urban systems: “living with floods”. The imperative is to
acknowledge the importance of social, institutional and economical component when managing flood risk. The
Flood Resilience Index (FRI) represents a tool for stakeholders and decision makers. Different weights in matrix for
evaluation FRI on macro scale highlight the most important variables that are contributing higher level of resilience
for the certain case study area.
An outcome is improved flood resilience by use of diverse regulations such as institutional, urban planning and
design, architectural design, public participation, financial stimulation, etc... A majority of flood risk management
(FRM) strategies are based on historical events by depending on resistance measures. Accepting resilience concept
urban communities are moving to the risk culture.
In conclusion, the importance is in the possibility to use experience from flood resilience urban systems and
avoid huge flood damages and dysfunction. The developing urban systems can find a good practice and good paths
towards flood resiliency without reaching a low level of functioning.

Acknowledgements

Research on the CORFU (Collaborative research on flood resilience in urban areas) project was funded by the
European Commission through Framework Programme 7, Grant Number 244047.
The research work presented here has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework
Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant agreement n° 603663 for the research project PEARL (Preparing for
Extreme And Rare events in coastaL regions). The research and its conclusions reflect only the views of the authors
and the European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.

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