Bioenergetics: Open Access

Abstract

Measuring flood resilience: A Typology of Community Flood Resilience

Finn Laurien

There is an urgent need to better understand the benefits and
costs of investments into building resilience, and the decision-
making processes that determine them. To tackle this challenge
the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA) developed
a holistic approach for measuring flood resilience at the community
level across the globe. The framework and associated
data management tool builds on the five capitals (5Cs) of the
Sustainable Livelihoods Frameworks, and the four properties
of a resilient system (4Rs). Over 2 years five NGOs collected
baseline, endline, and outcome measures (if a flood occurred)
in 118 communities in 9 countries, with more than 6700 direct
engagements of households, discussion groups and key informants.
It is estimated that more than 200.000 people have been
positively affected by enhanced knowledge generated through
the Flood Resilience Measurement Tool. As a key result, this
paper identifies general dynamics and inter-dependencies
between flood resilience indicators, which will help to build
more consistent and reliable indicators for measuring flood
resilience. The results identify different community clusters in
terms of baseline flood resilience grades and general community
characteristics, which indicates that flood resilience has common
patterns across the world. The quantitative results also
proved to be a powerful tool for decision-support and advocacy.
With regard to disaster resilience practice, we find that the
process of implementing the FRMC tool facilitated in-depth
discussions about communities and flood resilience, and that
this had a capacity building effect within user organizations.
A general conclusion is the increasing relevance of baseline
studies for any decision-making process to inform policy-makers
at different levels. We glean learnings about the communities
from the baseline data, which will be critical when we
proceed to test the post event and endline data.

Published Date: 2020-12-23; Received Date: 2020-12-09