Page - 19 - in options, Volume winter 2014/2015

19winter 2014/2015 + optionswww.iiasa.ac.at The world is facing increasing risks as globalization connects people, economies, and ecosystems. Globally, the number of people exposed to floods each year is increasing at a higher rate than population growth. People are drawn to live on flood plains partly because of economic opportunity. However, it is increasingly recognized that communities cannot totally avoid risks. To date, the development and the disaster risk management (DRM) communities have relied on a mix of interventions to help communities cope with flooding: “hard” interventions like building a dam or flood evacuation routes and, to a much lesser extent, “smart and soft” interventions like land use planning, insurance, and early-warning systems. Flood risk management is dominated by single interventions, many of which fail to meet their objectives because they do not consider the wider socioeconomic system within which they operate. In some instances interventions can even be counter productive for resilience, inadvertently undermining development or actually increasing risk in another way. The Flood Resilience Alliance is using a participatory and iterative approach to develop sustainable portfolios of interventions that tackle both flood risk and development objectives in synergy. Says Adriana Keating, IIASA’s Flood Resilience Alliance project manager, “The strategies communities use to pursue their development and wellbeing objectives have a profound impact on risk. Likewise, the way a community approaches its disaster risk has a profound impact on development and wellbeing. The trick is to get these two working in a virtuous cycle, rather than undermining each other.” Mechler explains, “A proper understanding of resilience in qualitative and quantitative terms has been lacking in resilience research to date. Arguably, this is why there has been little concrete, measurable progress on the ground. The new initiative focuses on benchmarking and tracking the underlying sources of resilience and the long-term outcomes.” For the flood-prone communities involved in the study, this means shedding light on why one community may fare better than another in the same disaster, despite seemingly identical levels of development and vulnerability. According to Keating, “With the informa- tion and resources acquired in this  work, communities will not just be able to bounce back after a disaster. They’ll be able to actually bounce forward in terms of making progress on important develop- ment objectives, such as increasing and strengthening livelihoods, and building requisite infrastructure.” KP Further info Keating  A, Campbell  K, Mechler  R, Michek-Kerjan  E, Mochizuki  J, Kunreuther  H, Bayer  J, Hanger  S, McCallum  I, See  L, Williges  K, Atreya  A, Botzen  W, Collier  B, Czajkowski  J, Hochrainer-Stigler  S, Egan  C (2014). Operationalizing Resilience Against Natural Disaster Risk: Opportunities, Barriers, and a Way Forward. White Paper, Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance. §  Kundzewicz  ZW, Kanae  S, Seneviratne  SI, Handmer  J, Nicholls  N, Peduzzi  P, Mechler  R, Bouwer  LM, Arnell  N, Mach  K, Muir-Wood  R, Brakenridge GR, Kron W, Benito  G, Honda  Y, Takahashi  K, Sherstyukov  B (2014). Flood  risk and climate change: Global and regional perspectives. Hydrological Sciences Journal 59(1):1–28 [doi:10.1080/02626667.2013.857411]. §  www.iiasa.ac.at/Flood-Resilience Reinhard Mechler mechler@iiasa.ac.at Adriana Keating keatinga@iiasa.ac.at WhAt IS reSIlIeNce? Resilience has a rich history and multiple interpretations. Used widely in engineering, psychology, and economics, it was brought to IIASA by C.S. Holling in 1973 for application to ecological systems. The centrality of “shocks” to the concept has made resilience an appealing concept in the disasters field where it has proliferated in recent years. IIASA researchers conceptualize disaster resilience as, “the ability of a system, community, or society to pursue its social, ecological, and economic development and growth objectives, while managing its disaster risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way.” This understanding of resilience stresses that a resilient community is one that can not only survive and recover from disaster events, but actually thrive in the face of these events and continue to strive toward new opportunities as risks change. The project’s approach to resilience is to focus on the outcomes of actions for people’s wellbeing. Wellbeing goes beyond wealth to encompass the social, human, environmental, physical, and financial capitals and capacities which make up the community system. + the ImperAtIve: FrOm rISk AvOIdANce tO lIvING WIth rISkS forward Geographic centers of the more than 3,700 large floods observed  globally from 1985 to 2010. Many  of these floods hit key loci of socioeconomic development. Future socioeconomic and climatic changes are expected to  exacerbate flooding and undermine human wellbeing. Source: Kundzewicz et al. (2014)