Chris Zevenbergen - IHE Delft Institute for Water Education
Resilience is widely used in flood risk management policies, but still largely conceptually. Despite notable advances in social-ecological sciences and numerous attempts to make it operational, there is still a limited number of empirical and quantitative case studies to demonstrate the practical relevance in flood risk management. Nevertheless, the concept of resilience (as opposed to resistanceii) represents a new way of thinking about flood disaster mitigation embracing the philosophy that, as a society, we should learn to live with floods and to manage flood risk and not seek to avoid it. Resilient flood risk strategies aim at reducing flood risk through a combination of protection, prevention and preparedness spanning a wide range of flood probabilities (from regular to rare flood events).
