New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 2 - Spring 2015 | Page 62

New Water Policy and Practice

and coordinated way throughout the river basin. In Integrated Flood Risk Management
resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, and societies to survive, adapt,
and grow in the face of shocks. In the context of climate change, resilience is not
only about reducing the risk of disaster but also about ensuring “failure” does not
result in catastrophic consequences to life and infrastructure. Adaptive management
is an important concept in building resilience (Royal Society 2014). According to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, adaptive management is a process of
iteratively planning, implementing, and modifying strategies for managing natural
resources in the face of uncertainty and change (IPCC 2014). Adaptive management
involves adjusting approaches in response to observations of their effect and changes in
the system brought on by resulting feedback effects. Resilience building is an ongoing
process involving new use of information and evaluation of existing measures to
regularly update resilience planning and decision making. In the context of managing
climate change, extreme weather events, including flooding, adaptive management
involves identifying and prioritizing the risks and opportunities associated with
extreme weather, implementing measures to address them, establish monitoring
arrangements and regularly assess the effectiveness of interventions, and evaluate the
process and adjust measures as a result. However, full knowledge of the risks and
consequences of extreme weather events are often partial and incomplete, for instance
it is almost impossible to predict future flooding events with precision and accuracy.
By recognizing this uncertainty, an adaptive management approach enables decisions
to be made and actions to be taken in the absence of complete information. The result
is policies that embed flexibility. Acting under uncertainty and accepting some risk of
failure are frequently necessary in pursuing opportunities to increase resilience. With
climate change the risk of inaction is the greatest risk (Royal Society 2014).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines risks as the potential
for consequences where something of value is at stake and where the outcome is
uncertain. Risk is often represented as a probability of a hazardous event occurring.
A common way of estimating risk is to measure the exposure (presence of people,
livelihoods, species or ecosystems, environmental functions, services, and resources,
infrastructure or economic, social or cultural assets in places and settings that could
be adversely affected) and vulnerability (propensity or predisposition to be adversely
affected, including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope
and adapt) of people, combined with the severity and likelihood of a hazard, where
hazard is defined as a physical event that may cause loss of life, injury, or other health
impacts as well as damage to property, infrastructure, livelihoods, service provision,
ecosystems, and environmental services. As such, reducing risk (the combination of
hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) is a core component of enhancing resilience. With
a focus on flooding, flood risk is determined by the occurrence of flooding which may
impact exposed populations and assets (e.g. houses located near flood plains) while
vulnerability is the characteristic of the population or asset making it particularly
susceptible to damaging effects e.g. fragility of housing constructing, poorly planned
development, poverty, environmental degradation, and climate change (Royal Society
2014).
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