Journal of Environmental Management 271 (2020) 111025

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Journal of Environmental Management

journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jenvman

Review

Learning from Floods: Linking flood experience and flood resilience

Da Kuang a, Kuei-Hsien Liao b, *
a
School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
b
Graduate Institute of Urban Planning, National Taipei University, Taiwan

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: It has been argued that learning from flood experience contributes to flood resilience. However, it is unclear what
Flood experience such a learning process involves, and it is debatable whether flood experience always leads to flood resilience. To
Learning bridge this research gap, we develop the Learning from Floods (LFF) model to articulate the process of learning
Learning-based flood mitigation
from flood experience and how it affects flood resilience. The LFF model suggests that flood experience prompts
Learning from floods
individual and social learning to give rise to flood-related knowledge, which is subject to learning opportunity,
Flood resilience
learning motivation, and prior knowledge. Flood-related knowledge could inform flood management and/or
other action, which however can be limited by barriers, including information and resource availability, attitude,
social capital, and policy barriers. Together, flood-related knowledge and its resulting action are considered the
lesson learned, which then affects flood resilience through changing floodability, recoverability, adaptability,
and/or transformability. We apply the LFF model to discuss the different learning processes and their respective
effects on flood resilience in two environments. It suggests that an environment that is well-protected by flood
control infrastructure is not conducive to learning about flood mitigation. Subsequently, we call for learning-
based flood mitigation to nurture flood resilience in the face of climate change.

1. Introduction
Flooding is the most frequently occurring natural hazard globally,
causing widespread life and property losses every year (Willner et al.,
2018). As increasing extreme storms and continuing urbanization make
flood management increasingly challenging, the concept of flood resil­
ience receives growing attention. The expanding literature on flood
resilience has explored its definition and application (e.g., De Bruijn
et al., 2017; Hegger et al., 2016; Liao, 2012), assessment measures (e.g.,
Keating et al., 2017; Kotzee and Reyers, 2016; Lhomme et al., 2013;
Restemeyer et al., 2015), and practical strategies (e.g., Lennon et al.,
2014; Schelfaut et al., 2011; Vis et al., 2003; Zevenbergen et al., 2008).
However, there is still scant explicit discussion on the process through
which flood resilience is nurtured or eroded. To bridge this knowledge
gap, this article explores a fundamental mechanism that affects flood
resilience—learning.
The term “learning” is frequently referred to in the literature on
social-ecological resilience, where it is suggested that natural dis­
turbances—i.e., inherent environmental dynamics—play an important
role in social-ecological resilience (Berkes et al., 2000; Carpenter et al.,
2001; Folke, 2006; Olsson et al., 2004b). Learning from a certain
disturbance can increase the resilience to that very disturbance through
enhancing the adaptability of the social-ecological system (Carpenter
et al., 2001; Gunderson and Holling, 2002). Such an argument has been
applied to hazard resilience, since human communities subject to nat­
ural hazards can also be considered social-ecological systems (see
Resilience Alliance, 2007). Godschalk (2003) argues that hazard resil­
ience requires the capacity to learn from hazard experience. Aldunce
et al. (2015) maintain that building resilience to hazards is underpinned
by learning from experience and sharing knowledge within the com­
munity. Zevenbergen et al. (2008) argue that learning from past flood
experience contributes to developing effective approaches to flood
resilience; and Ten Brinke et al. (2008) argue that this is because flood
events allow the system to go repeatedly through the learning cycles to
reduce the vulnerability to similar events in the future.
Existing literature appears to suggest that learning from flood
experience contributes to flood resilience; however, it is unclear what
mechanisms such learning involves, and it is debatable whether flood
experience always leads to flood resilience. In this article, we provide a
theoretical framework—the Learning from Floods (LFF) model—to
articulate the process of learning from flood experience and how it af­
fects flood resilience. It is applicable to a community of any scale and

* Corresponding author. Graduate Institute of Urban Planning, National Taipei University, New Taipei City, 237, Taiwan.
E-mail addresses: da.kuang@link.cuhk.edu.hk (D. Kuang), liaokh@mail.ntpu.edu.tw (K.-H. Liao).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111025
Received 6 February 2020; Received in revised form 26 June 2020; Accepted 27 June 2020
Available online 6 July 2020
0301-4797/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
D. Kuang and K.-H. Liao
concerns the learning of the general public, i.e., individuals of the
community and the community as a whole. The LFF model is also an
attempt to clarify the role flooding plays in flood resilience, which is
rarely discussed explicitly.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows: We first review
the notion of learning in existing literature on resilience thinking. Next,
we define flood resilience and then explain the LFF model. Subse­
quently, we apply the model to discuss the learning processes in two
fundamentally different environments, theoretically demonstrating that
different patterns of flood experience arising from different environ­
ments can have different effects on flood resilience. Lastly, we argue for
“learning-based flood mitigation” to nurture flood resilience in the face
of climate change.
2. Learning in resilience thinking
Two different interpretations of resilience can be distinguished: en­
gineering resilience and ecological resilience (Holling, 1996). Engi­
neering resilience concerns a system’s stability and its speedy return to
the original state after a disturbance. This article, however, focuses on
ecological resilience, which concerns a system’s long-term survival
through changes and is first theorized by Holling (1973). Concerning
only ecosystems, Holling’s (1973) original notion of resilience has been
developed into social-ecological resilience and expanded into “resilience
thinking” over the decades (see Berkes et al., 2003; Folke et al., 2010;
Walker et al., 2004). Today, a broader concept of resilience includes
persistence, adaptability, and transformability (Keck and Sakdapolrak,
2013). In resilience thinking, learning is often mentioned in the context
of adaptive management and adaptability (or adaptive capacity). Here,
we review how learning is linked to these concepts; furthermore, since
natural disturbance is argued to play an important role in resilience, we
also discuss the relationship between learning and natural disturbance.
2.1. Learning, adaptive management, and adaptability
Adaptive management was proposed as an alternative approach to
natural resource management (Holling, 1978; Lee, 1993; Walters,
1986). It is “a systematic process for improving management policies
and practices by learning from the outcomes of management strategies
that have already been implemented” (Pahl-Wostl et al., 2008, p.4).
Earlier discussions on adaptive management focused on the concept of
learning by doing, i.e., the iterative process to continually modify
management policies and strategies (Walters, 1986). Recent studies
embrace a collective learning perspective, and the concept of collabo­
rative management has been incorporated to give rise to adaptive
co-management (see Armitage et al., 2008; Armitage et al., 2009; Olsson
et al., 2004a). The collective learning process is widely referred to as
“social learning”, which stresses learning through social interactions
(Fernandez-Gimenez et al., 2008; Muro and Jeffrey, 2012; Pahl-Wostl
et al., 2013). Social learning can be understood as “a change in under­
standing that goes beyond the individual to become situated within
wider social units or communities of practice through social interactions
between actors within social networks” (Reed et al., 2010, p.6).
Adaptive management is argued to be an approach to increase
adaptability, which can be understood as the “capacity of a system to
adjust, via changes in its characteristics or behavior, to cope better with
existing and future stresses” (Pahl-Wostl, 2007, p.52). Existing literature
suggests that learning and adaptability are linked in two ways. Firstly,
adaptability derives from the increase of knowledge, which is a result of
learning (Eakin et al., 2010; Williams et al., 2015). Adaptability is
enhanced through the accumulation and testing of knowledge through
learning (Gunderson, 2010). Secondly, adaptability requires learning
ability because learning is an important mechanism to maintain the
system’s capacity to evolve (Carpenter et al., 2001). The ability to learn
from past experience is considered as an important component of
adaptability (Keck and Sakdapolrak, 2013). Current literature has not
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Journal of Environmental Management 271 (2020) 111025
gone beyond these arguments to explore what exactly learning involves.
2.2. Learning and natural disturbance
In ecology, a disturbance is a “relatively discrete event in time that
disrupts ecosystem, community, or population structure, and changes
resources, substrate availability, or the physical environment” (White
and Pickett, 1985, p.7). It should be noted that the term disturbance
does not necessarily connote disaster in ecology (see Pickett et al.,
1992). In an ecosystem, disturbances can prevent one species from
excluding others to maintain diversity and resilience (Holling et al.,
1995). However, because natural disturbances are largely considered
undesirable to society, the conventional command-and-control man­
agement strives to resist natural disturbances to maintain the stability of
the system (Colding et al., 2003). Nevertheless, it has been realized that
natural disturbances are important to not only ecosystems but also
social-ecological systems that depend on the health of ecosystems
(Berkes et al., 2003). Furthermore, natural disturbances “open up op­
portunities for reevaluating the current situation, trigger social mobili­
zation, recombine sources of experience and knowledge for learning,
and spark novelty and innovation” (Folke et al., 2010, p.5); therefore,
natural disturbances are also important to social-ecological resilience.
As natural disturbances are key to social-ecological resilience, nat­
ural hazards have also been argued to be important to hazard resilience
as learning opportunities. For example, Aldunce et al. (2015, p.7) argue
that “accepting that disasters and changes happen opens up the possi­
bility of framing them as opportunities for improvement and innova­
tion”. This is in line with the concept of “bounce forward”, where
disasters are considered to be learning opportunities for livelihood
enhancement (Manyena et al., 2011). Literature on hazard resilience
generally agrees that changes made after a disaster could influence
resilience (e.g., Birkmann et al., 2010; Manyena et al., 2011). Such
changes could be adjustments to hazard management action, policy, or
institution to decrease the vulnerability of the system (Aldunce et al.,
2015). Most of the existing literature focuses only on learning from di­
sasters; for example, the Disaster Resilience of Place model proposed by
Cutter et al. (2008) implies that learning only takes place when the
impact of the hazard exceeds the community’s absorptive capacity.
However, natural hazards do not always lead to disasters. The phe­
nomenon of flooding does not always lead to a flood disaster. In this
article, we assume that all flood events, be it disastrous, harmless, or
beneficial, present opportunities to learn. The difference is what is
learned.
2.3. Learning and flood experience
As mentioned earlier, learning from flood experience has been
argued to be important to nurture flood resilience (Ten Brinke et al.,
2008; Zevenbergen et al., 2008). Existing literature mainly discusses
learning with regards to changes in flood management policies and
property-level flood mitigation.
Flood experience can often trigger “policy learning” (Brody, 2003;
Nye et al., 2011), where flood management policies are changed or
strengthened in response to flood events (Brody et al., 2009). A small,
local flood could prompt a negotiation process among the stakeholders
(local residents, local and state governments, etc.) to incrementally
change flood management policies; a large, regional flood could accel­
erate the process and involve those who were previously apathetic to
flood management policies (Johnson et al., 2005). Policy learning could
potentially lead to policies that promote flood resilience; however,
because policy learning is strongly affected by “policy legacies” (Brody,
2003; Van Buuren et al., 2016), it is debatable whether learning itself
would always result in increased flood resilience.
Property-level flood mitigation has received increasing attention in
recent years, as flood management has shifted focus from flood pre­
vention to “flood risk management” in the recognition that flooding can
D. Kuang and K.-H. Liao
never be completely prevented (Bubeck et al., 2012; Osberghaus, 2017).
Central to the notion of flood risk management is shared responsibility
between the government and citizens: citizens also need to be respon­
sible for mitigating flood impacts at the property level (Bichard and
Kazmierczak, 2012; Henstra et al., 2019). Property-level flood mitiga­
tion measures include floodgates, air-vent covers, flood-proofing, etc.
(Bichard and Kazmierczak, 2012; Owusu et al., 2015). They play
important roles in flood resilience of a community by increasing indi­
vidual households’ ability to avoid or reduce flood damage (Begg et al.,
2017). Although learning is rarely explicitly discussed in the literature
on property-level flood mitigation, empirical studies show that flood
experience leads to increased risk awareness (Burningham et al., 2008),
more attention to weather forecast and flood warning (Knocke and
Kolivras, 2007), and willingness to take mitigation and response mea­
sures (Bubeck et al., 2013; Kreibich et al., 2005; Lawrence et al., 2014;
Osberghaus, 2017). We consider these behavioral changes to be an
obvious form of learning. There is also evidence that flood experience
contributes to a better understanding of flood impacts. For example,
Siegrist and Gutscher (2008) show that people without any flood
experience have difficulties imaging how they would feel during a flood:
while they can envisage the potential impacts, e.g., property damage,
thanks to mass media reports, they cannot imagine the negative feelings,
such as fear, insecurity, and helplessness, often described by those with
actual flood experience.
To sum up, existing literature suggests that learning from natural
disturbance is an important mechanism to nurture resilience. We build
on this widely accepted discourse to develop the LFF model, premising
that learning from flood experience affects flood resilience. Many
questions remain to be answered. For example, what exactly is learned
from flood experience? Does the same flood event, experienced by
different groups, produce different learning processes to lead to different
effects on flood resilience? More fundamentally, does learning from
flood experience always lead to increased flood resilience? It is beyond
the scope of this article to answer these questions. Because before they
can be answered, it is necessary to establish the theoretical links be­
tween flood experience and flood resilience. This is the purpose of the
LFF model put forward in this article. But before we introduce the
model, it is important to first define flood resilience.
3. Flood resilience
There are divergent notions of flood resilience. It is widely concep­
tualized that flood resilience concerns the ability to quickly recover from
a flood disaster (e.g. De Bruijn, 2005; Gilbert, 2010; Lhomme et al.,
2013); however, there has not been a consensus regarding the role flood
resistance plays in flood resilience. Here, flood resistance refers to the
capacity to prevent flooding from occurring in an area that is naturally
subject to flooding by using flood control infrastructure, such as levees,
floodwalls, dams, piped drainage networks, and pumping stations;
and/or by temporary emergency flood-fighting measures. Some scholars
explicitly argue that flood resistance is important to flood resilience (e.
g., Dieperink et al., 2018; Hegger et al., 2016; Morrison et al., 2018;
Restemeyer et al., 2015). For example, Hegger et al. (2016, p.3) view
“resistance as an enhancing factor for resilience”; Restemeyer et al.
(2015, p.47) argue that the “resistant strategy (technical measures such
as dikes, dams, and sluices) may also make a city more resilient” and that
technical measures “must be an inherent part of a resilience strategy”.
Other scholars interpret flood resilience without reference to flood
resistance. For example, Zevenbergen et al. (2008) interpret flood
resilience as the ability to adapt to and recover from the hazard; Liao
(2012) defines flood resilience as the ability to tolerate flooding or to
quickly reorganize after a flood disaster. So €rensen et al. (2016) argue
that flood resilience is the ability to anticipate, adapt to, reorganize, and
learn from floods.
The view that flood resistance is key to flood resilience is associated
with the perception in industrialized society that flooding is often
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Journal of Environmental Management 271 (2020) 111025
hazardous and hence should be prevented in the first place (Liao et al.,
2019). However, this perception is incomplete. Flooding can also be a
critical development resource for rural communities in certain parts of
the world, such as the Mekong Delta (Ehlert, 2012) and Bangladesh
(Thompson and Sultana, 1996). Furthermore, it is possible to mitigate
flood impacts without flood resistance. Communities where livelihoods
depend on periodic flooding have developed adaptive measures, e.g.,
living in stilt houses, using boats, and assembling temporary footbridges
for transportation, such that they can be flooded without damage and
loss (Liao et al., 2016). It is therefore important to distinguish between
three highly related but different terms. A “flood” is a hydrological
phenomenon when water temporarily covers the land. A “flood hazard”
is flooding that occurs in a human community to pose a potential danger.
A “flood disaster” is flooding that causes substantial damage and
severely interrupts social-economic activities. Floods are not necessarily
flood disasters. Flood disasters occur only when human communities are
unable to mitigate the impacts of flood hazards.
Because flooding is not always hazardous, we define flood resilience
as the ability to avoid or minimize flood damage when flooding occurs; or,
in the case where flooding causes substantial damage and severe so­
cioeconomic interruption, flood resilience is the ability to rapidly
recover from the flood disaster to a functional state. Derived from Hol­
ling’s (1973) original notion of resilience, where natural disturbance is
recognized to be inherent to system dynamics, our definition recognizes
that flooding is inherent to any human community by a river. This
definition focuses on the capacity to absorb the impact of flooding when
it occurs and is congruent with the widely cited definition of
social-ecological resilience: “the capacity of a system to absorb distur­
bance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain
essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks”
(Walker et al., 2004, p.2). Here, flood resilience to a particular flood
event depends on “floodability”—the ability to be flooded without
damage and disruption (Liao, 2012); as well as recoverability—the
ability to rapidly recover from a flood disaster. However, maintaining
flood resilience through different flood events over time also requires
adaptability, defined here as the ability to continue to adjust flood
management to adapt to a changing flood regime. Note that adaptability
is a process-oriented concept, with an emphasis on incremental adjust­
ment (Heazle et al., 2013; Keck and Sakdapolrak, 2013). A currently
flood-adapted community that does not continue to adjust its flood
adaptive measures to respond to increasing flood risk, nevertheless, does
not have adaptability. A community that currently lacks flood resilience
needs transformability, defined here as the capacity to fundamentally
transform flood management and other systems, to promote flood
resilience.
Following Holling (1973)’s demonstration that stability and resil­
ience are fundamentally different system properties, we argue that flood
resilience is different from flood resistance. Flood resistance is about
maintaining stability, turning the previously flood-prone environment
free from flooding. While it allows for undisrupted social and economic
activities, such command-and-control management that artificially sta­
bilizes inherently dynamic systems (e.g., floodplains) can erode resil­
ience and lead to system collapse (Holling and Meffe, 1996). Using the
Mississippi River as an example, Holling and Meffe (1996, p.331) argue
that “the inextricably combined riverine-social system” has “little
resilience during extreme storm events” because of flood control. While
flood resistance and flood resilience are different properties in theory
and it has been well recognized that exclusive reliance on flood control
infrastructure is not a realistic solution, the discussion on flood resil­
ience cannot disregard flood resistance altogether. This is because flood
control infrastructure has already been omnipresent and will continue to
be a part of flood management in many areas of the world. Against this
reality, an important question begs to be answered: how does existing
flood control infrastructure affect flood resilience? This is particularly a
relevant question in the face of climate change, where flooding is
increasingly uncontrollable. Answering the question requires a more
D. Kuang and K.-H. Liao
rigorous examination of the relationship between flood resistance and
flood resilience. We will apply the LFF model as an initial attempt to
address this question in section 5.
4. The learning from floods (LFF) model
To articulate the process of learning from flood experience and how
it affects flood resilience of a community, we propose the Learning from
Floods (LFF) model (Fig. 1). The LFF model was developed through
synthesizing existing literature. It integrates the established arguments
on the links between flood experience, learning, and flood resilience we
have reviewed in section 2; it also incorporates theories on learning and
knowledge management.
In a nutshell, the LFF model suggests that flood experience prompts
learning, which involves individual and social learning, to generate
flood-related knowledge. This learning process is subject to learning
opportunity, learning motivation, and prior knowledge. Flood-related
knowledge informs flood management action, referring to any action
pertaining to flood mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery.
Flood-related knowledge can also inform other actions, such as institu­
tional, social, or economic changes. The translation from flood-related
knowledge to flood management and/or other action is subject to
several kinds of barriers, including information and resource availabil­
ity, attitude, social capital, and policy barriers. Together, flood-related
knowledge and flood management and/or other action are considered
the “lesson learned”, which then affects flood resilience through
changing floodability, recoverability, adaptability, and/or
transformability.
We note that the arrows in the LFF model do not suggest a linear
process from a certain flood experience all the way to flood resilience.
While a flood experience could generate some knowledge, knowledge
does not always lead to action (Argote and Miron-Spektor, 2011). It is
also important to note the limitations of the LFF model. Firstly, it only
represents a simplified picture of the complex processes through which
the actual degree of flood resilience is determined. Besides learning,
other processes, e.g., socioeconomic changes, can also affect flood
resilience. Human communities are inherently open systems, whose
resilience is not only controlled by their agents, but also strongly
influenced by cross-scale interactions (Gunderson and Holling, 2002).
Processes operating at larger scales beyond the community, e.g.,
regional and national policies, can profoundly affect flood resilience.
Moreover, these processes can also control flood experience in the first
place. We indicate the possible influences of other processes and pro­
cesses operating at larger scales on flood resilience in Fig. 1. However,
because of the limited scope of this article, we do not further discuss the
influences of these processes, and the architecture of the LFF model does
not fully incorporate cross-scale interactions among all the factors per­
taining to learning. Secondly, while the government plays an important
Fig. 1. The Learning from Floods (LFF) model.
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Journal of Environmental Management 271 (2020) 111025
role in flood management and hence flood resilience, the LFF model
does not address policy learning. Learning of the general public can lead
to policy changes that influence flood resilience, and this is taken into
consideration in the LFF model, but we do not directly address the
learning of the government itself because the process can be quite
different. In the rest of this section, we explain the LFF model in more
detail.
4.1. Flood experience
It is important to first distinguish between two types of lear­
ning—direct acquisition of knowledge and learning from experience
(see Horvath et al., 1996; Sternberg et al., 2000). The former is the
acquisition of codified knowledge from books, teachers, media, etc.,
which has been pre-processed for the learner; and knowledge acquired
this way is often explicit knowledge. However, the LFF model concerns
the latter—learning from experience. Besides explicit knowledge,
learning from experience also generates tacit knowledge. Explicit
knowledge from books and other sources is second-hand knowledge,
providing only generalized ideas, while tacit knowledge acquired from
experience is usually contextualized (Eraut, 2004). For example, one
does not need to experience flooding to know that elevating a building
above the flood level could prevent flood damage; however, actually
experiencing a flood could enrich such knowledge with locally specific
details, such as the suitable height of elevation or appropriate structural
design. Furthermore, actually experiencing flooding helps detect the
problem of flood management action, as each flood puts its effectiveness
to test (see Kolb, 1984).
Here, flood experience means the practical contact with and obser­
vation of a flood. Flood experience is subject to flood impact and flood
regime. We stress again that flood experience is not necessarily disaster
experience. It could be entirely harmless and even beneficial for liveli­
hood; or, it can simply be “nuisance flooding”, which causes only minor
damage and disruption but does not “pose significant threats to public
safety or cause major property damage” (Moftakhari et al., 2018,
p.4218). Therefore, the flood impact on an individual or a community
could be either harmless (or even beneficial), inconvenient, or disas­
trous. Different flood regimes could also create different flood experi­
ences. Flood regime refers to the frequency, variety, magnitude, timing,
duration, rate of change, etc. of flooding. For example, undergoing
prolonged flooding frequently is a very different experience from
encountering flash flooding occasionally.
4.2. Individual learning and social learning
Learning from flood experience can occur at both individual and
social levels. The learning of an individual has been extensively explored
in psychology, and it is conceptualized as a mental process that connects
D. Kuang and K.-H. Liao
changes in one’s knowledge to behaviors (Knowles et al., 2012). In the
LFF model, individual learning occurs when an individual transforms
flood experience into flood-related knowledge (see Kousky, 2010;
Parker et al., 2009). Such a process can be explained by Kolb’s (1984)
Experiential Learning theory, which puts forward four phases in the
transformation from personal experience to knowledge: concrete expe­
rience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active
experimentation. Individual learning begins already before flooding
occurs when, for example, one moves the valuables up to higher posi­
tions to avoid damage (concrete experience). This subsequently leads to
his reflecting on the event, e.g., reassessing whether the aforementioned
measure is effective (reflective observation). The reflection results in
new appraisals or even new theories about flood management, which is
the generation of new flood-related knowledge (abstract conceptuali­
zation). This subsequently informs flood management action to better
prepare for the next flood. The flood management action taken will then
be tested in the next flood (active experimentation), which leads to a
new concrete experience. This cycle is a process of learning by doing.
Social learning is a process of collective development of knowledge
of an organization (Argyris and Scho €n, 1978; Huber, 1991). Here, it
refers to the process through which the flood-related knowledge held by
the individuals is shared among the members of a social group. A typical
example is the sharing of experiences and information about floods with
neighbors (see Lo, 2013; Reynaud et al., 2013). Social learning has three
important characteristics (Reed et al., 2010): First, it takes place through
social interactions; secondly, it leads to a change in understanding; and
thirdly, such a change goes beyond individuals to situate within the
wider social unit of practice. The Socialization, Externalization, Com­
bination, and Internalization (SECI) model by Nonaka (1994) can
further explain the social learning process: Tacit knowledge of the in­
dividual members of a community is first shared through social­
ization—interacting with others. Socialization provides an opportunity
to articulate their tacit knowledge by using, for example, metaphors or
analogies, thereby converting it into explicit knowledge. For example, in
the Mekong Delta, the farmers would liken seasonal flooding to a turtle
to indicate its slow rise and recession (Ehlert, 2012). Such a process,
where tacit knowledge becomes explicit, is externalization. This is fol­
lowed by combination, where the explicit knowledge held by different
individuals is combined to create new explicit knowledge. For example,
a flood risk map that integrates local knowledge held by different
community members can be considered new explicit knowledge (Tran
et al., 2009). When a member of the community acquires this map and
through reading and interpreting it based on his/her own understand­
ing, the information contained in the map is contextualized and is then
converted into tacit knowledge owned by that community member. This
conversion process is internalization. In short, social learning is an up­
ward spiral process, where different knowledge owned by different in­
dividuals are combined and disseminated to become group-level
knowledge (Nonaka, 1994).
Individual and social learning can take place simultaneously. They
are also complementary; that is, flood-related knowledge generated
through individual learning can be enriched through social learning,
and vice versa. As mentioned earlier, the LFF model does not concern
policy learning, which is the form of learning mostly discussed in the
existing literature on resilience, which we have reviewed in section 2.3.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting their differences and relationship. The
notions of individual and social learning focus on the general public as
the learner, and the result of learning is cognitive change, e.g., an in­
crease in flood risk awareness, and/or behavioral change, e.g., from
inaction to taking property-level measures to respond to increased flood
risk awareness. The notion of policy learning focuses on the government
as the learner, and the result of learning is the creation of new policies or
reinforcement of current policies (Huitema et al., 2010; Newig et al.,
2016; Su�skevi�cs et al., 2018). Despite the differences, individual
learning and social learning of the general public can influence policy
learning of the government. For example, in the Thames floodplain in
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Journal of Environmental Management 271 (2020) 111025
the UK, the public preference for flood control infrastructure is consid­
ered to be the fundamental reason behind the reluctance of the gov­
ernment to promote non-structural measures in flood management
(Harries and Penning-Rowsell, 2011). Policy learning can also influence
individual and social learning of the general public. For example, the
shift from the sole reliance on flood control infrastructure to the more
integrated policy of flood risk management has led to the residents in
two Alpine valleys better acknowledging the importance of
non-structural measures (Buchecker et al., 2016). While our LFF model
does not explicitly address policy learning, it incorporates the possibility
that individual and social learning can end up influencing policies that
can affect flood resilience (see section 4.4).
4.3. Influencing factors
While actually experiencing flooding is important to learning, it does
not always lead to effective learning, i.e., learning that produces the
desired result (Spitzer, 2005). Here, effective learning refers to learning
that can increase flood resilience. According to the Motivation, Oppor­
tunity, and Ability (MOA) model, which is widely applied in organiza­
tional learning and knowledge management (e.g., Argote et al., 2003;
Siemsen et al., 2008; Weerakoon et al., 2019), we argue that the gen­
eration of flood-related knowledge, which affects the effectiveness of
learning, is subject to learning motivation, learning opportunity, and
learning ability (in the form of prior knowledge).
Learning motivation concerns the willingness to acquire knowledge.
Learning does not necessarily require motivation to take place; some­
times it can occur spontaneously (Eraut, 2000). For example, unwilling
evacuees in a flood emergency would learn, although unwillingly, about
the evacuation process when they are evacuated by force. Such learning
is without consciousness and a reflection process (see Reber, 1989). On
the contrary, motivated learning is deliberate, with a certain goal and
involves reflection on one’s experience, action, or communication
(Eraut, 2000). According to the Expectancy Theory proposed by Vroom
(1964), motivation requires expectancy, instrumentality, and valence.
Expectancy is the belief that learning improves flood management ac­
tion; instrumentality is the belief that the improved flood management
action reduces flood damage; and valence is the perceived importance of
flood safety—the ultimate goal of flood management action.
Learning motivation of the general public for flood mitigation, in
particular, is controlled by their flood risk awareness. Research shows
that increased flood risk awareness results in increased willingness of
households to take property-level mitigation measures (Fuchs et al.,
2017; Harries, 2012; Terpstra, 2011). However, when people are pro­
tected by flood control infrastructure, the resultant trust and false sense
of security lead to low flood risk awareness (Bradford et al., 2012;
Pielke, 1999; Poussin et al., 2014). For example, Ludy and Kondolf
(2012) find that most residents living in low-lying areas behind the
100-year levees in Stockton, California consider themselves to be safe
and are unwilling to take property-level measures to protect themselves.
Therefore, we hypothesize that the presence of flood control infra­
structure—a centralized flood mitigation measure often carried out by
the government—suppresses the learning motivation of the general
public to actively pursue knowledge on flood mitigation. Time also plays
a role in flood risk awareness to affect learning motivation. Flood risk
awareness often increases immediately after a flood, when people have
the greatest desire to learn about and take flood mitigation measures
(Lamond and Proverbs, 2009). However, as the memory of the flood
fades away over time, flood risk awareness also diminishes (Bubeck
et al., 2012). Empirical studies find that the increased flood risk
awareness prompted by a flood would fade away in 4–6 years (Haer
et al., 2017), and it can become minimal within 7 years (ICPR, 2002).
Therefore, learning motivation can decrease over time after a flood.
However, government policies can promote learning motivation. For
example, it is found that subsidies can motivate homeowners to learn
about and take property-level flood mitigation measures in the UK
D. Kuang and K.-H. Liao
(Owusu et al., 2015).
Learning opportunity concerns the opportunity to directly engage in
a flood, e.g., being in the floodwater, being rescued from a flood, and
cleaning up after a flood; it also concerns the opportunity to take flood
management action. Learning opportunity is influenced by flood fre­
quency, which determines the chances to practice flood management.
Higher flood frequency is conducive to learning since it implies more
intensive “training” to survive the flooding. People living in areas
frequently flooded are found to have more knowledge of flooding (Brilly
and Polic, 2005), while those living in areas rarely flooded can simply
overlook the possibility of flooding (Baan and Klijn, 2004). In the UK, it
is found that only those who have experienced at least three floods are
likely to prepare for flooding (Harries, 2013). Therefore, we hypothesize
that effective learning requires a certain degree of flood frequency. With
regards to social learning, learning opportunity concerns the ease of
sharing flood-related knowledge within the community, which can be
promoted by shorter psychological distances or more trust (Levin and
Cross, 2004).
As mentioned, flooding can be disastrous, inconvenient (i.e.,
nuisance flooding), or harmless. The different impacts represent
different learning opportunities and learning results. In the literature on
organizational learning, learning from failure and from success are
clearly distinguished (e.g., Argote, 2011; Ellis et al., 2006; Starbuck and
Hedberg, 2001). The former allows for error detection and correction to
improve future performance (Ellis et al., 2006). The latter, while less
likely to promote changes, increases the efficiency of the use of knowl­
edge since it confirms the effectiveness of prior knowledge (KC et al.,
2013). A disastrous flood is an opportunity to learn from failure, which
can lead to some change in flood management approach, while a
harmless flood an opportunity to learn from success, which can increase
the belief in the existing flood management approach and generate more
knowledge about flooding and flood mitigation. In any case, whether the
result of learning can increase flood resilience is still influenced by
learning ability.
Learning ability is the ability to acquire knowledge. Although it is
often considered innate, it is also influenced by training and prior
knowledge (Argote et al., 2003). While training helps develop learning
strategies to facilitate knowledge acquisition (Derry and Murphy, 1986),
learning ability here depends solely on prior knowledge. People usually
learn and assimilate new knowledge through establishing linkage with
what they’ve already known (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990). It is easier to
grow the knowledge similar to one’s prior knowledge; for example,
learning calculus would be easier if one already knows algebra (Ellis,
1965). Furthermore, prior knowledge can steer the direction of the new
knowledge generated (Roschelle, 1995).
Where governments have taken an active role in flood management,
an individual’s prior flood-knowledge can be heavily influenced by
government policies. For example, the provision of flood control infra­
structure by the government for people living in flood-prone areas often
leads them to believe that they are safe (De Marchi and Scolobig, 2012;
Ludy and Kondolf, 2012). With each time flood control infrastructure
successfully prevents flooding, it enhances the knowledge that flood
control infrastructure works and increases people’s trust in the gov­
ernment (see Wachinger et al., 2013). Prior flood-related knowledge is
also controlled by an individual’s worldview. For example, an empirical
study in Kristianstad, Sweden reveals that the worldview of “statio­
narity” (i.e., nature fluctuates with a fixed range; see Milly et al., 2008)
prevents people from considering flood-proofing measures (Johannes­
sen and Hahn, 2013). Therefore, we hypothesize that prior flood-related
knowledge can steer the generation of new flood-related knowledge to a
certain direction, thereby limiting the scope of learning and preventing
the development of alternative knowledge.
4.4. Lesson learned
Because of the aforementioned influencing factors, learning from
6
Journal of Environmental Management 271 (2020) 111025
flood experience does not always give rise to the same lesson. As such, in
the LFF model we clearly distinguish between “learning” as a process
and “lesson learned” as the result. Lesson learned includes flood-related
knowledge generated from flood experience, as well as flood manage­
ment and/or other action informed by the newly generated knowledge.
The newly generated knowledge is manifested in cognitive change (see
Argote, 2011; Heikkila and Gerlak, 2013), which concerns the change of
people’s belief and viewpoints on floods (e.g., flood risk, flood hydrol­
ogy, flood ecology), which then informs their decisions on flood man­
agement. For example, people previously with little risk awareness can
become aware of the importance of flood preparation after experiencing
a flood disaster (Lawrence et al., 2014).
However, flood-related knowledge does not always lead to action.
There are at least four kinds of barriers that affect the translation of
flood-related knowledge into action. The first is information and
resource availability. For example, even if people are aware of flood risk,
the lack of a flood warning system could lead to delayed and inadequate
action. In the UK, it is found that those who didn’t receive a warning
before a flood often fail to move valuables to safer areas and hence suffer
from greater flood losses than those who received a warning (Parker
et al., 2007). In addition, the availability of resources, e.g., money, time,
and tools, also determines the ability to act. For example, in the rural
villages in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, where people live in stilt
houses to adapt to seasonal flooding, households would further elevate
the house soon after encountering a flood that submerges the house
floor; however, financially constrained households simply cannot take
such an action, despite knowing that an even higher flood is always
possible in the future (Liao et al., 2016). The second kind of barrier
pertains to attitude. Fatalism, wishful thinking, and denial can all lead to
what is called “non-protective response” and hence inaction (Harries,
2013; Grothmann and Reusswig, 2006). For example, some residents in
an Irish town are found to refuse to take any flood protection measures
because they are convinced that nothing could be done to reduce flood
losses (Fox-Rogers et al., 2016). The third kind of barrier pertains to
social capital. Social norms, social networks, and trust can all have in­
fluences on individual and collective action (Lo et al., 2015; Pelling and
High, 2005). For example, a study shows that after Hurricane Katrina,
residents in the community characterized by low social capital were less
likely to cooperate with neighbors and took more than twice as long to
recover than residents in the community characterized by strong social
capital (Elliott et al., 2010). The fourth type of barrier is policy barriers,
including path dependency and institutional fragmentation. Referring to
the tendency of the previous policies of a specific direction to confine the
development of new policies in the same direction (Pierson, 2000), path
dependency can prevent any new flood management action. For
example, it is argued that the institutional path dependency in the
Netherlands “hinders a shift toward more resilient flood risk gover­
nance” (Van Buuren et al., 2016, p.2). Path dependency can also result in
the general public to expect the government to keep delivering the same
flood management policy and hence can impede the application of new
flood-related knowledge (Wiering et al., 2017). Institutional fragmen­
tation refers to a situation where responsibility is allocated among
different actors or agencies (Cook, 2014). It is argued to be a key feature
of flood management in many countries, including France, Netherlands,
and UK (Hegger et al., 2016). Institutional fragmentation increases the
difficulty to implement a new policy because it makes it difficult for
multiple stakeholders to reach a consensus (Gersonius et al., 2016). The
aforementioned four kinds of barriers are all affected by socioeconomic
processes and processes operating at larger scales, as indicated in the
upper right of the diagram of the LFF model in Fig. 1.
4.5. From lesson learned to flood resilience
Flood management and/or other action, informed by flood-related
knowledge, could have an effect on flood resilience. The action can be
behavioral change of the individual members of the community, or
D. Kuang and K.-H. Liao
policy change per citizens’ request. As mentioned, flood management
involves mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery. Mitigation
refers to permanent measures to reduce the potential negative flood
impacts; preparation refers to emergency measures to reduce flood im­
pacts immediately before a flood occurs when existing mitigation
measures are expected to be untenable; response (or rescue) refers to
emergency measures to avoid further flood losses when a flood disaster
occurs; and recovery refers to measures in the aftermath of a flood
disaster to restore social and economic activities. Flood-related knowl­
edge could also prompt changes not directly about flood management. It
could also prompt other institutional, social, or economic changes.
As defined earlier, flood resilience depends on floodability and
recoverability. Action pertaining to mitigation and preparation affects
floodability, while that pertaining to response and recovery affects
recoverability. Other action, such as institutional, social, or economic
changes, while not directly concerning floodability and recoverability,
might influence adaptability, if it changes the ability to continue to
adjust flood management; or influence transformability, if it changes the
capacity to transform flood management and other systems. Learning
from flood experience is not always effective to increase flood resilience,
and it depends on what lesson is learned. We will demonstrate this in the
following section.
In short, the LFF model involves three premises. Firstly, flood
experience is conducive to learning because it provides the opportunity
to acquire knowledge, which could inform action to affect flood resil­
ience. Secondly, learning from flood experience can have different re­
sults, depending on the learner, the characteristics of the flood
experienced and influencing factors. Subsequently and thirdly, only
learning that eventually increases floodability, recoverability, adapt­
ability, or transformability can increase flood resilience.
5. Learning in two different environments
Learning begins with flood experience, and different patterns of
flood experience—in terms of flood regime and flood impact—could
lead to different learning processes and results. Our LFF model serves as
a framework to systematically understand learning from different flood
experiences. To demonstrate how to apply the LFF model and as an
initial attempt to explore the question—the relationship between flood
resistance and flood resilience—raised in section 3, here we use the LFF
model as an analytical framework to discuss the learning processes in
two different environments. These two environments are characterized
by contrasting levels of flood resistance: a well-protected environment
of high flood resistance and an unprotected environment of no flood
resistance. We focus particularly on the learning of the general public
about flood mitigation.
5.1. Learning in a well-protected environment
A well-protected environment is where people are protected by flood
control infrastructure with a high design standard. Such an environment
is commonplace—most major cities across the world are well-protected
such that flooding occurs much less frequently than would have
occurred naturally. It has been well understood that a sense of com­
placency associated with flood control infrastructure can lead to reduced
flood risk awareness (Ludy and Kondolf, 2012; Pielke, 1999; Tobin,
1995). This implies that the learning motivation of the general public for
knowledge about flood mitigation is low. For example, it is found that
the provision of flood control infrastructure has led to the residents in
the Alpine region of Italy to gradually lose their self-protection skills and
to become unwilling to prepare for floods (De Marchi et al., 2007). As
most floods are prevented, there is also little learning opportunity to
begin with. Research has shown that those who lack flood experience are
often optimistically convinced that they are safe into the future (Law­
rence et al., 2014). While a well-protected environment is considered
highly desirable, it is not conducive to learning, as it leads to little
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Journal of Environmental Management 271 (2020) 111025
learning motivation and opportunity in the first place. Furthermore,
although flood control infrastructure can significantly reduce flood
frequency, it cannot eliminate flooding altogether. When flooding does
occur, for which people with low risk awareness are often unprepared, it
is often catastrophic because it means the failure of flood control
infrastructure (see Tobin, 1995). Flooding associated with levee or dam
breach is much more hazardous than natural flooding because of its
sudden onset and high velocity, and it could inundate areas that
otherwise would not be inundated (Cenderelli, 2000).
A disastrous flood experience often prompts negative feelings
(Birkland et al., 2003), and people are likely to demand greater flood
control because of their prior knowledge on flood mitigation (see Mor­
rison et al., 2019). As argued earlier, despite major conceptual changes
in flood management, it is still widely believed that flooding must be
prevented in the first place for flood safety. Research has shown that
seeing flood control infrastructure in person can inspire trust (Terpstra,
2011). With the prior knowledge that flood resistance is paramount and
flood control infrastructure can be trusted, coupled with the policy
legacy of flood resistance, the resulting action is often the construction
of new or reinforcement of existing flood control infrastructure (Barnett
et al., 2015, Wiering et al., 2017). This can be exemplified by New
Orleans, where the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina led to a massive
upgrade of flood control infrastructure (see Gotham et al., 2018). Such
flood management action, while enhancing flood resistance, does not
increase floodability—the ability to reduce flood damage when flooding
occurs. Nevertheless, a disaster experience provides the opportunity to
learn about recovery and could inspire the public to demand new pol­
icies or tools to enhance recoverability. As for adaptability, if a flood
disaster leads to action other than increasing flood resistance, it could
contribute to adaptability. However, if the action simply reinforces the
existing flood management approach, e.g., structural measures continue
to be the only answer to flood safety, then it would not increase
transformability.
5.2. Learning in an unprotected environment
A completely unprotected, but frequently-flooded environment is
relatively uncommon, but as mentioned earlier, there are still rural
communities that depend on and adapt to periodic flooding (Cuny,
1991). Since floods are needed for agriculture and fishery, households in
these communities have developed measures, such as building stilt
houses to stay above the flood level, using boats and footbridges to
remain mobile, and selecting flood-tolerant crops for agriculture, to
avoid damage and disruption during the flood season (Cuny, 1991;
Ehlert, 2012; Paul, 1984). These flood adaptive measures are arguably
the results of a long-term process of learning by doing over generations.
While sounding inconvenient, an unprotected, frequently-flooded
environment is conducive to learning. Since a centralized mitigation
measure, i.e., flood control infrastructure, does not exist, people have to
take distributed, property-level measures to survive. It implies higher
learning motivation for flood mitigation. In the unprotected villages in
the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, villagers widely consider themselves—as
opposed to the government—to be solely responsible for flood safety
(Liao et al., 2016). Furthermore, floods occur naturally and a lot more
frequently in an unprotected environment than a well-protected envi­
ronment. This implies more flood experiences and thus more learning
opportunities. However, because of the flood adaptive measures, most
floods experienced are harmless.
As people are forced to prepare for every flood, they are continuously
learning by doing. Since their prior knowledge on flood mitigation is
dominated by property-level measures, each flood experienced enriches
that area of knowledge. Flood experience also generates flood-related
knowledge that is difficult to acquire in a well-protected environment,
such as natural flood hydrology and flood ecology (e.g., more fish during
the flood season). However, not every flood leads to action, but a
disastrous flood would. For example, in the aforementioned villages in
D. Kuang and K.-H. Liao
the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, a flood that is too high or too stormy can
become a disaster, and most households would further raise their stilt
houses soon after a disaster (Liao et al., 2016). This further increases
their floodability, leading to increased flood resilience. Recoverability
could also increase, if the flood disaster leads to some action that could
speed up the recovery in the future. However, flood experience may or
may not contribute to adaptability, as adaptability depends on whether
the households can continue to adjust their flood mitigation measures.
As mentioned earlier, while most households in the aforementioned
villages are able to continue to raise their houses after every flood that
exceeded the height of the house floor, some households cannot afford to
do so because of financial constraints (Liao et al., 2016).
6. Towards learning-based flood mitigation
The preliminary analysis above suggests that different patterns of
flood experience arising from different environments can have different
effects on flood resilience through learning. It also suggests that flood
mitigation approaches can increase or erode flood resilience. The two
environments discussed above represent two ends of the flood mitiga­
tion spectrum: the well-protected environment represents the “flood
resistance paradigm”, where flood safety is to be achieved exclusively by
preventing flooding in the first place; the unprotected, frequently-
flooded environment represents the “flood adaptation paradigm”,
where flood safety is to be achieved only by adjusting the living envi­
ronment so it can be flooded safely, without the attempt to significantly
change the natural flood regime. The term adaptation is subject to
different interpretations, but for the sake of discussion, here adaptation
is akin to what it means in biology, i.e., adjustment of the organism to
become fit to the given environment.
The flood resistance paradigm could end up only creating disastrous
flood experiences. While disaster experience might help enhance one
aspect of flood resilience—recoverability, prior knowledge and policy
legacies can lock flood mitigation in the same path of flood resistance to
reduce floodability (Van Buuren et al., 2016; Wiering et al., 2017). The
presence of flood control infrastructure is therefore not conducive to
learning about flood mitigation. Contrary to the argument that flood
control infrastructure constitutes an important part of flood resilience,
our LFF model suggests that it could instead reduce flood resilience in
the long term. However, our analysis focuses on the type of environment
that relies exclusively on flood control infrastructure, i.e., flood resis­
tance at a large scale; but there can be environments where flood
resistance is localized, i.e., only certain locations are protected by
smaller-scale flood control infrastructure. Still, there are environments
characterized by different mixtures of the flood resistance and flood
adaptation measures. Therefore, empirical research is necessary to
further understand how different degrees of flood resistance affect flood
resilience through mediating the learning process from flood experience.
Resilience has been argued to be a desirable quality for mankind’s
survival in the era of uncertainties under climate change (Aldunce et al.,
2015; Berkes, 2007). Nurturing flood resilience requires a flood miti­
gation paradigm that promotes—instead of suppressing—effective
learning from flood experience. We therefore call for “learning-based
flood mitigation”—a flood mitigation approach that aims to promote
effective learning from harmless floods by the general public to nurture
flood resilience. Learning-based flood mitigation prioritizes distributed
measures, including property-level flood proofing techniques and
localized flood retention areas. It strives to foster an environment where
flooding takes place in harmless ways to provide learning opportunities.
It is based on the assumption that experiencing flooding more frequently
would prompt people to contemplate more on the phenomena of
flooding and increase their flood risk awareness.
A certain degree of harmless flooding can be fostered by nature-
based solutions (Lennon et al., 2014). In rural areas, the government
could implement an easement program or provide compensation for the
farmers during the flood season such that farmlands can be flooded
8
Journal of Environmental Management 271 (2020) 111025
without economic losses, such as the Yolo Bypass for the Sacramento
River in California (Opperman et al., 2009). In urban areas, waterfront
parks can be naturalized such that they can be frequently flooded while
still functioning for recreation, such as the Yanweizhou Park in Jinhua,
China. In densely populated urban areas, where there are limited open
spaces, it is still possible to accommodate some degree of flooding by
turning every possible green space—including pocket parks and road­
side planting strips—into a retention area for stormwater runoff. While
learning from very small-scale, highly localized flooding can be limited,
it still provides some opportunity for the public to observe some degree
of hydrological change in the environment during the rain.
Learning-based flood mitigation promotes citizen responsibility in
flood mitigation to stimulate learning motivation. It has long been taken
for granted in the industrialized society that flood mitigation is pri­
marily the responsibility of the government (Owusu et al., 2015). To be
sure, the importance of shared responsibility between the government
and citizens has been recognized in the concept of flood risk manage­
ment (Henstra et al., 2019). But learning-based flood mitigation focuses
more on the responsibility of citizens, as research has shown that the
perception of self-responsibility can increase people’s motivation to take
flood mitigation and preparation measures (Motoyoshi, 2006). It is
particularly important to modern cities, which can easily be devastated
by an extreme storm event, despite being well-protected by flood control
infrastructure. To better respond to such an event, increasing flood­
ability is critical, and it requires mainstreaming distributed flood miti­
gation measures.
However, movement towards learning-based flood mitigation would
face at least three challenges. Firstly, public acceptability of distributed
flood mitigation measures depends on public perception towards
flooding (Harries, 2012). Such perception is heavily influenced by mass
media that tend to focus on the dramatic aspect of flood impacts
(Birkland et al., 2003), which often exaggerate the adverse impacts of
flooding (Kasperson and Kasperson, 1996), and might have contributed
to the belief that floods must be resisted in the first place. Secondly, the
government’s promotion of distributed flood mitigation measures could
be hindered by a lack of standardized procedures to evaluate their costs
and benefits (Harries and Penning-Rowsell, 2011). Thirdly,
socio-economically marginalized populations may not afford to take
property-level flood mitigation measures; and governments—particu­
larly those in low-income nations—may not have additional financial
capacity to subsidize low-income households after spending on costly
flood control infrastructure (see Shah et al., 2017). Therefore, moving
towards learning-based flood mitigation requires transformability. It
requires changing the current flood mitigation system into one where
citizens understand their responsibility in flood management based on a
more comprehensive understanding of flooding, which is not always
harmful. It also requires a shift of public investment from centralized to
distributed flood mitigation measures.
To be sure, the discourse of flood management has shifted from flood
resistance to flood risk management, where non-structural measures are
paid greater attention (Butler and Pidgeon, 2011; Sayers et al., 2013).
However, while the concept of flood risk management acknowledges the
limit of flood control infrastructure and thus accepts a certain level of
risk (Challies et al., 2016), it has yet to discuss the impact of flood
resistance on flood experience and the subsequent learning process. It is
still assumed that a certain degree of flood resistance in the first place is
paramount (Driessen et al., 2016). As the world is faced with a new
normal of uncertain extremes, it requires a more critical examination of
the conventional wisdom. By proposing the concept of learning-based
flood mitigation, we hope to draw attention to and call for more
research on the role flood experience plays in flood resilience through
learning.
7. Concluding remarks
The LFF model establishes the theoretical links between flood
D. Kuang and K.-H. Liao
experience, learning, and flood resilience. It can serve as an analytical
framework to systematically examine the process of learning from flood
experience and how it affects flood resilience. It would be fruitful to
apply the LFF model to conduct empirical studies to compare the
learning processes under different flood mitigation schemes with
different degrees of flood resistance to understand their potential effects
on flood resilience. It would also be important to study different cities or
towns with the same degree of flood resistance to assess whether the
learning process is consistent. Researchers could first characterize the
flood experience of each case in terms of flood regime and flood impact,
and then examine the influencing factors, i.e., learning motivation,
learning opportunity, and prior knowledge. Subsequently, researchers
could identify the newly generated flood-related knowledge, as well as
the associated action taken. Attention should be paid to whether there is
any barrier to prevent knowledge from turning into action. Finally, re­
searchers could analyze how the action affects flood resilience in terms
of floodability, recoverability, adaptability and/or transformability.
Such a study should provide insights into how to move towards learning-
based flood mitigation.
The year 2019 alone witnessed several flood disasters caused by
extreme storm events, for example, in Queensland (Australia), Iowa
(USA), Jiangxi (China), and Nagano (Japan), just to name a few. It is our
hope that the LFF model could inspire more research into learning, an
important mechanism for nurturing resilience for humanity to become
better fit in the era of climate change.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank the three anonymous reviewers for their
constructive comments that helped to significantly improve this article.
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