ABSTRACT
Understanding a flood risk situation and its local impacts requires an appraisal of the intersections between ‘different types of flooding’ and ‘different kinds of community’. This chapter brings these two types of diversity together. Building on Chapter 1, it sets the scene for other domains – like flood risk perception and community agency – explored in later chapters within this book. It asks:
What are the different types of floods – their character and distinctiveness – as experienced by impacted communities, and what are the implications for building community flood resilience?
How do diversity and change in both floods and communities manifest in these interactions, and what are the consequences for environmental justice?
What happens when different paradigms (ways of thinking) about flood management are viewed through a ‘community’ lens? What are the implications for community empowerment, agency, and ownership of these changing strategies?
The chapter discusses interactions between floods and communities, and the implications for flood impacts. This includes increasing challenges of environmental justice in those affected and impacts of increasingly compound and cascading risks on communities. It then explores the distinctive and changing roles of communities required within different flood management paradigms, before progressing to explore community-focused, flood risk management as an explicit shift in thinking.
