scholarly journals Collaborating With Communities: Citizen Science Flood Monitoring in Urban Informal Settlements

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Wolff ◽  
Matthew French ◽  
Noor Ilhamsyah ◽  
Mere Jane Sawailau ◽  
Diego Ramírez-Lovering
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Management ◽  
Risk Reduction ◽  
Citizen Science ◽  
Flood Risk ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Informal Settlements ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Flood Monitoring

Concerns regarding the impacts of climate change on marginalised communities in the Global South have led to calls for affected communities to be more active as agents in the process of planning for climate change. While the value of involving communities in risk management is increasingly accepted, the development of appropriate tools to support community engagement in flood risk management projects remains nascent. Using the Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments Program as a case study, the article interrogates the potential of citizen science to include disadvantaged urban communities in project-level flood risk reduction planning processes. This project collected more than 5,000 photos taken by 26 community members living in 13 informal settlements in Fiji and Indonesia between 2018 and 2020. The case study documents the method used as well as the results achieved within this two-year project. It discusses the method developed and implemented, outlines the main results, and provides lessons learned for others embarking on citizen science environmental monitoring projects. The case study indicates that the engagement model and the technology used were key to the success of the flood-monitoring project. The experiences with the practice of monitoring floods in collaboration with communities in Fiji and Indonesia provide insights into how similar projects could advance more participatory risk management practices. The article identifies how this kind of approach can collect valuable flood data while also promoting opportunities for local communities to be heard in the arena of risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

Adaptation tipping points and opportunities for urban flood risk management

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 695-710 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Koukoui ◽  
Berry Gersonius ◽  
Paul P. Schot ◽  
Sebastiaan van Herk
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Management ◽  
Flood Risk ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Heat Waves ◽  
Drainage System ◽  
Flood Risk Management ◽  
Tipping Points ◽  
Urban Flood

The effects of climate change are expected to increase the frequency and magnitude of floods, droughts and heat waves. An emerging method termed adaptation tipping point – opportunity (ATP-O) assesses a system's climate-incurred tipping points and uses opportunities arising from urban developments to introduce adaptation strategies while reducing investment costs. The objective of this research was to apply the ATP-O method to the city of Dordrecht in the Netherlands. The results show that the alternative adaptation strategy proposed (an overland drainage system) would be effective in coping with the effects of climate change where the current management strategy (disconnection of impervious surfaces from sewer systems) fails to do so. The ATP-O also proved helpful in identifying opportunities to adapt at lower costs. This research stimulated discussions between stakeholders on performance objectives, policy development, investment strategies, and flood risk management practices. The sensitivity analysis performed to support such discussion revealed that small variations in acceptability thresholds, associated with policy objectives, can have significant impact on ATP occurrence and timing.

Extreme floods value distributions under recent global warming in Northern Italy, and new risk management policies. The project FLORIMAP

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattia Galizzi ◽  
Renzo Rosso ◽  
Daniele Bocchiola
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Management ◽  
Risk Communication ◽  
Flood Risk ◽  
Flood Hazard ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Flood Risk Management ◽  
Recent Climate ◽  
Management Policies

<p>Flood risk in Italy is a wide-spread and never-ending issue. Traditional flood defense focused on making the river system “resistant” to flood events, possibly by flood-control structures including floodwalls, levees, dams and channels. These actions reduce the frequency of inundations, but they do not affect flooding effects, and associated impacts once the flood plain is inundated. In facts, structural flood defenses are designed and operated to accommodate floods not exceeding a given magnitude, as fixed by the original design. Thus, these engineering works are highly inefficient to cope with capacity-exceeding floods, the magnitude of which was fixed many years ago using poor data sets, and it is expected to increase with climate changes.</p><p>FLORIMAP (Smart FLOod RIsk MAnagement Policies), a project funded by Fondazione CARIPLO aims to revalue extreme floods distribution in the different homogeneous areas of northern Italy using regional approaches based upon recent data form the last three decades.</p><p>FLORIMAP will first cover open issues associated with the quantification of flood hazard and inundation risk, then it will assess human exposure and vulnerability, and combine these issues with strategies of communication and risk management, because risk communication is an important activity that can influence the flood risk management. Communication is the bridge between the technical and professional community, decision makers, elected officials, funding sources, and the public at large. The literature on risk communication and perception has highlighted that the understanding of the psychological perception of environmental risk is a crucial factor in order to foster the community resilience and to promote adaptive attitudes and behaviors.</p><p>Here, we present a preliminary assessment of updated extreme values distribution for the case study of Northern Italy hydrologically homogeneous regions. The results will be then compared against those obtained with previous dataset dating until 1970, to study the evolution of flood hazard and inundation risk under recent climate change. We then provide application of flood hazard, and risk for a case study area, and demonstrate modified hazard under recent climate change.</p><p>We then discuss implications for risk communication in the target areas, and provide suggestions for prosecution of the FLORIMAP project. </p>

scholarly journals Characterising Local Knowledge across the Flood Risk Management Cycle: A Case Study of Southern Malawi

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Šakić Trogrlić ◽  
Grant Wright ◽  
Melanie Duncan ◽  
Marc van den Homberg ◽  
Adebayo Adeloye ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Flood Risk ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Flood Risk Management ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
Complex Knowledge

People possess a creative set of strategies based on their local knowledge (LK) that allow them to stay in flood-prone areas. Stakeholders involved with local level flood risk management (FRM) often overlook and underutilise this LK. There is thus an increasing need for its identification, documentation and assessment. Based on qualitative research, this paper critically explores the notion of LK in Malawi. Data was collected through 15 focus group discussions, 36 interviews and field observation, and analysed using thematic analysis. Findings indicate that local communities have a complex knowledge system that cuts across different stages of the FRM cycle and forms a component of community resilience. LK is not homogenous within a community, and is highly dependent on the social and political contexts. Access to LK is not equally available to everyone, conditioned by the access to resources and underlying causes of vulnerability that are outside communities’ influence. There are also limits to LK; it is impacted by exogenous processes (e.g., environmental degradation, climate change) that are changing the nature of flooding at local levels, rendering LK, which is based on historical observations, less relevant. It is dynamic and informally triangulated with scientific knowledge brought about by development partners. This paper offers valuable insights for FRM stakeholders as to how to consider LK in their approaches.

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