ABSTRACT
Settings for future local flood risk management are dynamic, complex, and uncertain. Hence, effective community action and multi-stakeholder co-working are increasingly critical in decreasing social vulnerability and building place-based, socio-ecological resilience. This future-facing chapter explores the potential to ‘build forward’ in developing community resilience, and for communities to thrive rather than survive. It asks:
What are the changing contexts to future community-focused, flood risk management?
What are the critical interdisciplinary agendas that need researching to inform building community resilience to future flood risk?
What innovations, trends, and approaches could transform community participation within community-focused, flood risk management for longer-term resilience?
How are such changes in community resilience (transformative or otherwise) meaningfully measured, and who will monitor them?
The chapter explores critical points of leverage and interventions with potential to step-change local community-focused, flood risk management. It identifies opportunities to integrate solutions that promote both learning for resilience to place-based risks and active participatory hydrocitizenship. It then reflects on how community resilience in disaster risk management has potential to be transformed by actively putting marginalised groups at the centre of engagement strategies that share knowledge, provide resources, and promote agency. The chapter reflects on opportunities and challenges for specific interventions in building resilience of diverse communities. These include attending to systemic impacts like improved health and well-being, harnessing new communication technologies, involving communities in resilient urban design, and increasing community participation in adaptive governance. Finally, it emphasises importance of measuring changes in resilience to identify and share interventions with transformative potential in different community settings.
