Social-Technical Flood Resilience in Water Sensitive Cities – Adaptation across spatial & temporal scales (Project B4.2)

Overview

In recent years the prolonged drought in Australia has been interrupted by heavy rainfall causing flooding in many urban and rural areas. Rules for responding and adapting to changing flood and drought risks, in an integrated fashion, are still evolving. Cycles of floods and droughts, for example in Europe, have prompted the development of new approaches for adaptation in the last few years on which this project is partially based.

The project will further develop existing Dutch and other European flood risk management practices and adapt them to an Australian context. The project aims to improve adaptation-related decision-making to focus expenditure on greatest return on investment to deliver robust infrastructure and achieve a community resilient to flooding and other risks.

Key outcomes

This project brings together a number of European approaches of embedding flood resilience into planning and will further develop the science and techniques required to integrate flood resilience into urban development processes.

The project is delivering guidance for urban planners, designers and policy-makers on how to achieve resilient social and technical adaptation to changing flood risks in the most cost-effective and efficient way. Researchers have produced guidelines for enhancing social and technical flood resilience in Australian urban systems and are developing case studies on implementation in the Australian and international context.

The implementation of the developed guidance will continue to be demonstrated and tested in case studies in Australia, the Netherlands and Vietnam. It will build capacity in decision-makers to utilise the developed and enhanced methods and to inform policymaking in the regulatory process.