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The PARA framework and resilience—each of the four main approaches has the potential to contribute to the “big picture” of community flood resilience Adapted from Tyler (2015)
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This paper uses the “protect/accommodate/retreat/avoid” or “PARA” framework to categorize and examine flood disaster risk reduction approaches used to build climate change resilience in communities across Canada. We suggest that the PARA framework, first developed for climate change adaptation planning in communities facing sea level rise, is also...
Citations
... Zoning and land use regulations have been used to prevent new building construction in undeveloped high fire risk areas [10]. Such approaches, referred to as 'avoidance' [11], do not remove infrastructure or housing, but rather maintain the existing state of undeveloped lands. Meanwhile, the cessation of homeowners' insurance in hazardous regions or government disinvestment from critical infrastructure such as road networks can lead to de facto or 'unmanaged retreat.' ...
... One example is the 2013 flood in Calgary, located in southern Alberta. This was the most damaging flood-related disaster in Canadian history, inflicting over CAD$ 6 billion in costs, affecting over 75,000 people, and claiming the lives of five people (Pomeroy et al. 2016, Sahni et al. 2016, Doberstein et al. 2019, Elkurdy et al. 2022. Because of the destructive effects of such calamities, the local government has been focusing its efforts on alleviating the country's adverse flooding effects by increasing the total budget amount for disasters and updating existing infrastructure to be better prepared for extreme conditions (Zahmatkesh et al. 2019, Pattison-Williams et al. 2018, Vrban et al. 2018. ...
... A general framework for the applied SAGE model. permissible coverage, resulting in large runoff accumulation and shorter runoff response time after rainy events, making the city susceptible to flooding (Akhter and Azam 2019, Zhang and Crawford 2020), which has occurred in recent years resulting in both material and human losses(Pomeroy et al. 2016, Doberstein et al. 2019, Tsang and Scott 2020, Elkurdy et al. 2022. ...
... The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report in 1990 outlining three main responses for adaptation to sea level rise: retreat, accommodate, and protect (IPCC 1990). Since then, additional distinctions have been made, including hard protection, soft protection, accommodation, retreat, no action, and avoid (Mallette et al. 2021;Doberstein et al. 2019). Definitions vary for each of these categories based on the guidelines they are taken from (Bongarts Lebbe et al. 2021 Restoration planning assists the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. ...
... Many papers emphasized understanding social and political contexts that impacted social acceptance or support for planning measures. A subset of papers moved beyond using SLO as a measurement by developing frameworks for public inclusion (Cradock-Henry et al. 2021;Doberstein et al. 2019;Jude 2008;Kelly et al. 2020;Rossiter and Levine 2014) and discussing SLO's potential as a tool to support marine conservation and management and connect marine user groups (Kelly et al. 2019). Most papers discussed SLO that was granted or withheld from organizations by communities. ...
Marine and coastal environments are diverse and dynamic, supporting competing human interests and demands. As society seeks to balance contested uses of space, more holistic planning processes have emerged, which consider social, economic, and ecological factors. One approach that considers social factors, and more specifically social acceptance, is "social license to operate" (SLO). Originating in the terrestrial mining industry, SLO has been adopted by various marine industries. Except for some emerging work in the conservation field, SLO is typically applied to industrial marine and coastal contexts. To understand SLO's uses in other marine and coastal planning contexts, namely conservation, adaptation, and restoration, we conducted a scoping review using the term SLO and similar concepts, including public or social acceptance, support, and buy-in. Results indicate the concept of SLO is still emerging in non-industrial marine and coastal planning, with an emphasis on gaining public acceptance rather than maintaining it. The concept of SLO was applied broadly, including as a measurement for public support and a product of effective engagement. Most publications focused on barriers and drivers of SLO. Influential factors are identified and organized by theme, then discussed based on their relationships within a social-ecological system framework. Considering the common factors and their associated systems helps to link elements necessary to obtain SLO, highlighting their interconnectedness with each other, society, and the natural environment. The findings of this review illustrate SLO's utility for academics and practitioners alike, through its application in methods, tools, values, and concepts that characterize public inclusion for marine and coastal planning.
... Widespread flooding and its far-reaching effects on populations have ignited the search for novel and robust ways of prevention and mitigation of flood risk. Global policy for disaster risk reduction prioritises the importance of regional resilience and adaptation strategies (Doberstein et al., 2019;Wamsler & Johannessen, 2020). This is the catalyst for various flood risk management actions taken at the local, national, and regional levels. ...
Flooding continues to ravage communities and leave societies driven by quest towards a more likely solution to flood threats. The need to accommodate both the provision of fundamental human needs and the core values and functions of the natural environment, for instance, controlling floods, puts emphasis on sustainability and illustrates the worth of ecosystem-based approach to flood risk management in locations inhabited by almost half a million people in danger of flooding. This study aims to assess the awareness of ecosystem services in the Ogun State of Nigeria and how a sustainable appropriation of the natural resources can aid local flood risk mitigation and control. The study employed a mixed-method approach through a thorough literature search to gather secondary data and a semi-structured questionnaire to source primary data from a population of 1483 participants in the study area. From the analyses, a considerable proportion of the participants (∼70%) possess a profound knowledge of flood risk and are aware of local flood abatement and ecosystem services. Based on all measured variables, only less than half of the sampled respondents identified with the idea of ecosystem, although just about 43.6% of the sampled population failed to grasp that exploring more efficient ways of using natural resources can aid in tackling flooding in the study area. With this outcome in mind, the area under study can only attain a holistic flood risk management framework by making ecosystem-based flood risk management the centrepiece of local flood risk mitigation policy and practice. This research suggests a new angle to help incorporate ecosystem service into local FRM, fortify the resilience of communities and adapt indigenous methods and assets for flood risk mitigation economy and regulation.
... The growing body of research highlights the urgency for flood risk managers to consider flood resilience as a crucial element in their efforts to reduce flood risk (Jones and Tanner 2017;Bottazzi et al. 2018b;Jones et al. 2018;Shah et al. 2018;Jones 2019;Oladokun and Montz 2019;Ahmad and Afzal 2020;Haque et al. 2022;Okunola and Olawuni 2022). This condition demonstrates that flood resilience has emerged as an essential element in reducing flood risk (Doberstein et al. 2019;Zevenbergen et al. 2020). Within the literature, resilience can be comprehended through various approaches, such as the bottom-up and topdown perspectives (McClymont et al. 2020;Zevenbergen et al. 2020), referred to as objective and subjective by Jones et al. (2018). ...
Flood resilience has emerged as an essential element in flood risk management, emphasizing the need to enhance urban stakeholders’ perceptual and mitigative capabilities to minimize vulnerability and mitigate the impacts of floods. Given the significance of reducing vulnerability, it becomes imperative to understand the full scope of resilience in flood risk management strategies. Therefore, the study proposed a framework for understanding flood resilience in an urban flood-prone area using a subjective approach in a study area in three f lood-affected Subdistricts in Periuk District, Tangerang City, Indonesia. A mixed-method strategy was employed, combining quantitative data from 354 affected households with qualitative insights from in-depth interviews with ten neighborhood leaders. The quantitative approach utilized composite indicators, criteria weighting, and indices to evaluate f lood resilience. The household questionnaire covered various factors influencing flood resilience, including social, economic, home environment, communication and information, social capital, institutional, and risk perception. The main finding of this study is that employing a subjective mixed method, incorporating quantitative and qualitative methodologies, enables a thorough assessment of household flood resilience. The results reveal that communication and information, social capital, institutional factors, and community perception exhibit notably very high indices, while criteria related to social, economic, and home environment factors attain relatively high scores. This study enhances the understanding of household flood resilience by employing a subjective approach, combining quantitative data from flood-affected households and qualitative data from neighborhood leaders. This framework expedites comprehension and yields reliable results.
... Traditionally, flood management in the region has relied on protective structures and strategies to reduce flood impacts. This protective approach often involves the use of hard engineered infrastructure, such as dikes, levees, and seawalls, to act as a barrier against floodwaters [34]. While dikes often mitigate short-term risk for low-intensity, high-frequency flood events, such as the average spring freshet, these systems are not designed to withstand extreme flood events or the complex challenges of climate change, notably the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events [35]. ...
... It is essential that governments explore alternative and complementary flood adaptation strategies that reduce hazard exposure, create co-benefits, and strengthen community resilience. Adaptation strategies will vary by local context and increasingly will require a hybrid approach that involves a broad suite of solutions-such as accommodating floodwaters, relocating from high-risk areas, avoiding further development in floodplains, and incorporating nature-based solutions [34]. ...
... Flood risk is determined by the combination of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. Thus, a reduction (or at least the control) of flood risk can be pursued by acting on its determinants, which means following three main approaches [15][16][17]: (i) protection, to reduce hazard through the construction of structures and systems, (ii) management, to reduce vulnerability through non-structural measures aimed at improving preparedness and resilience, and (iii) retreat and/or interdiction, to reduce exposure by relocation to safer areas and by preventing new settlements in floodprone areas. ...
The present work is aimed at assessing the change in time of flood risk as a consequence of landscape modifications. The town of San Donà di Piave (Italy) is taken as a representative case study because, as most parts of the North Italy floodplains, it was strongly urbanized and anthropized in the last several decades. As a proxy for flood risk, we use flood damage to residential buildings. The analysis is carried out at the local scale, accounting for changes to single buildings; GIS data such as high-resolution topography, technical maps, and aerial images taken over time are used to track how the landscape evolves over time, both in terms of urbanized areas and of hydraulically relevant structures (e.g., embankments). Flood hazard is determined using a physics-based, finite element hydrodynamic code that models in a coupled way the flood routing within the Piave River, the formation of levee failures, and the flooding of adjacent areas. The expected flood damage to residential buildings is estimated using an innovative method, recently proposed in the literature, which allows estimating how the damage evolves during a single flood event. The decade-scale change in the expected flood damage reveals the detrimental effect of urbanization, with flood risk growing at the pace of a fraction of urbanized areas. The within-event time evolution of the flood damage, i.e., how it progresses in the course of past or recent flood events, reflects changes in the hydrodynamic process of flooding. The general methodology used in the present work can be viewed as a promising technique to analyze the effects on the flood risk of past landscape evolution and, more importantly, a valuable tool toward an improved, well-informed, and sustainable land planning.
... The desirability of these interventions can change over time and according to context, with local populations having varying control over the type of interventions that are put forward and realised. While studies such as Dedekorkut-Howes et al. (2020) highlight the predominance of HI flood adaptations globally (see also Harries and Penning-Rowsell 2011;Doberstein et al. 2019), increasingly communities and governments employ the broader suites of adaptation options we outline here. Though each strategy has implications for reducing flood risk, the analysis here suggests that they also have different profiles of impact on people's lives with implications for the health and wellbeing of local populations. ...
Adaptation strategies to ameliorate the impacts of climate change are increasing in scale and scope around the world, with interventions becoming a part of daily life for many people. Though the implications of climate impacts for health and wellbeing are well documented, to date, adaptations are largely evaluated by financial cost and their effectiveness in reducing risk. Looking across different forms of adaptation to floods, we use existing literature to develop a typology of key domains of impact arising from interventions that are likely to shape health and wellbeing. We suggest that this typology can be used to assess the health consequences of adaptation interventions more generally and argue that such forms of evaluation will better support the development of sustainable adaptation planning.
... For our proposed flood adaptation framework to be effective, it must include several concurrent and integrated concepts. The implementation of this hierarchy requires individual property owners, community decision makers, and response/recovery entities to consider the frequency, duration, and magnitude of risks, potential impacts, proposed solutions, socioeconomic factors and trade-offs, and the integration of iterative assessments (Glavovic 2008, Auerswald et al. 2019, Doberstein et al. 2019, Tyler et al. 2019). This means prioritizing solutions with a lifespan over 100 years that promote healthy, natural systems, eliminating criteria that favor expediency and/or short-term solutions, and accounting for future conditions (e.g., sea-level rise, groundwater flooding, storm surge, higher intensity and more frequent precipitation events). ...
... The framework must be able to work at different scales (e.g., parcel to watershed) and in diverse landscapes to accommodate the unique needs of individual communities (Poff 2002, Van der Nat et al. 2016, Gourevitch et al. 2020. Socioeconomic factors, such as equity considerations (Diffenbaugh and Burke 2019, Kreslake 2019, Finucane et al. 2020, should be included in the evaluation of different options, as well as the ecological and social trade-offs at play in each situation (Doberstein et al. 2019, Raikes et al. 2019, Alves et al. 2020. It is also critical to allow for iteration throughout the process to account for changing environmental and social conditions (Tyler et al. 2019) and to support successful implementation at scale (Poff 2002, ASFPM 2008, McClaymont et al. 2020, Zevenbergen et al. 2020). ...
Traditional flood risk paradigms and associated strategies are no longer sufficient to address global flood adaptation challenges due to climate change and continued development in floodplains. The current flood adaptation approach is failing to take advantage of the benefits provided by intact ecosystems and perpetuates social and economic inequities, leaving those who are most vulnerable at highest risk.
Rooted in the experiences of the United States, we propose a new framework, the Flood Adaptation Hierarchy, which prioritizes outcomes into six tiers. Overall, the tiers distinguish between nature and nature-based solutions, with preference given to natural ecosystems. The most important outcome in our hierarchy is to avoid risk by protecting and restoring natural floodplains; next, eliminate risk by moving communities away from danger; and then to accommodate water with passive measures and active risk reduction measures. We include, but deprioritize, a defense of community assets using nature-based engineering and hardened engineering. Throughout the hierarchy, we provide guidance on the equity considerations of flood adaptation decision making and highlight “impacts,” “resources,” and “voices” as important equity dimensions. Implementing the framework through an iterative process, using justification criteria to manage movement among tiers, alongside equity considerations, will support adaptation to changing environmental and social conditions and contribute to risk reduction at scale. Though this approach is focused on U.S. flood management and adaptation, prioritizing risk reduction, elimination of risk, and accommodation of hazards over the defense against threats not only has global applicability to flood adaptation, but should also be evaluated for applicability to other climate-driven challenges.
... The flood risk management literature identifies four broad strategies to reduce exposure to coastal and riverine flood hazards: protect, accommodate, avoid, and retreat (Doberstein et al., 2019). The provincial government outlines these strategies in a sea level adaptation primer produced to support municipal adaptation efforts (British Columbia Ministry of Environment, 2013). ...
Neoliberal flood risk governance has become the norm in Canada and much of the rest of the global North in the interest, hypothetically, of achieving so-called efficiencies and resilience and, practically, out of desperation for access to any more resources to face a growing burden. This paper traces the path toward a flood risk governance model in Vancouver together with the development history of the city to illustrate the coproduction of urban landscape, capital, and flood risk. It situates what is intended to be a progressive “values-based” local adaptation planning program within that context to question whether or not such a program can elevate the use value of land. The paper demonstrates that a flood risk governance model further entrenches neoliberal hegemony and exchange values, with implications for urban space and how city inhabitants interact with flood hazards that are beyond the reach of values-based planning.
