Resilience indicators for flood risk management systems of lowland rivers

Abstract

Resilience strategies for flood risk management focus on minimising flood impacts and enhancing recovery in contrast with resistance strategies which aim at preventing floods entirely. Since resilience strategies are expected to result in improved flood risk management, they deserve careful evaluation. For the evaluation and comparison of strategies for flood risk management it is necessary to be able to quantify the resilience of the resulting flood risk management systems. However, no adequate methods to quantify this resilience are available yet. Therefore, this paper aims at defining and testing indicators for the resilience of flood risk management systems. A set of indicators is proposed, which covers the three aspects of resilience: amplitude of the reaction, graduality of the increase of reaction with increasingly severe flood waves, and recovery rate. To evaluate the behaviour of these indicators, they have been applied on simple hypothetical systems. It was found that with the combination of the indicators an overview of the resilience of flood risk management systems can be obtained.

Keywords:

• Flood risk management
• floods
• resilience
• systems approach