Participatory Modelling for Flood Resilience

Building flood resilience in times of a changing climate requires holistic and multidimensional approaches that recognize various aspects of risks including the social and human aspects. Decision-making for flood resilience, similarly, needs to go beyond focusing on conventional engineering and physical solutions and instead, consider broader aspects of flood resilience. Participation, engagement and knowledge exchange between different members of the community are crucial for such decision-makings as they provide context-specific and consensual knowledge. This calls for participatory knowledge production and aggregation methods to support flood resilience building. In this paper, we present a novel participatory modelling approach that we used to support decision-making for community flood resilience in Lowestoft, UK. To that end, we integrated a participatory measurement tool (i.e., Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities—FRMC) and a mind mapping method (i.e., Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping—FCM). First, FRMC (developed by Zurich flood resilience alliance) was used to measure 44 (financial, social, human, physical and natural indicators) indicators of community flood resilience in Lowestoft using the gathered data from a household survey (n=200), two participatory workshops, and 20 key-informant interviews. Second, FCM methodology was used to model the causal relationships among 44 indicators of resilience by eliciting data from 30 additional key-informant interviews. In the end, using FCM, we simulated the possible impacts of policyholders’ interventions on various aspects of flood resilience. The practical outcome of this study (already provided to the local authority of Lowestoft) is advocacy on the strengths/weaknesses of community flood resilience in this area and opportunities/challenges for future decision-makings and investment on flood risks. As a scientific contribution, we argue for relevance and usefulness of participatory measurement and modelling approaches for flood resilience highlighting the challenges and opportunities, and elaborate on the use of participatory approaches to improve our understanding of social and human dimension of flood resilience.