Development of a standardised framework with universal core indicators for flood resilience assessment

Abstract

Understanding the flood resilience of an area is an important task for decision-makers, practitioners, and community members. However, despite the wide acceptance of the need for resilience assessment in recent years, there has been no clear agreement on what flood resilience exactly constitutes and thus no consensus on the way in which it should be quantified. As such, this study aims to identify the most pivotal indicators to establish a standardised sustainable flood resilience framework (SFRF) for an overall measure of resilience before a flood event. The framework uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) indicators as a benchmark to establish a measurement structure that can be consistently implemented globally, using publicly sourced data. Users of the SFRF will be able to assess whether their target area has successfully achieved the conditions required for flood resilience and as a result, the associated UN SDG targets. A detailed review of 55 journal articles related to flood resilience assessment was first conducted to identify the most frequently used indicators globally across the different frameworks in the literature. A hybrid method using the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) approach combined with the analytic network process (ANP) was then adopted to rank the top indicators in terms of their importance in evaluating the flood resilience. Finally, two examples are provided to show how the SFRF established in this study can enable users to make a universally standardised assessment of the level of flood resilience for a specific area.