Managing flooding: from a problem to an opportunity.

The paper argues that the concept and practice of sustainability have proved too difficult to achieve within traditional water management, and there is a lack of political will to move towards truly sustainable water services. Instead, compromised concepts, including resistance, resilience, ecosystem services, natural capital and adaptation are defining approaches; each of which may contribute partially to sustainability. Pressures due to the changing climate, ecological degradation, human demands, urbanization and deteriorating assets are challenging sustainability and compelling changes to water management.

Flood resilience.

Three different conceptual frameworks of resilience, including engineering, ecological and social-ecological have been presented and framed within the context of flood risk management. Engineering resilience has demonstrated its value in the design and operation of technological systems in general and in flood resilient technologies in particular. Although limited to the technical domain, it has broadened the objectives of flood resilient technologies and provided guidance in improving their effectiveness.

Exploring trade-offs among the multiple benefits of green-blue-grey infrastructure for urban flood mitigation.

Climate change is presenting one of the main challenges to our planet. In parallel, all regions of the world are projected to urbanise further. Consequently, sustainable development challenges will be increasingly concentrated in cities.

Assessing the Co-Benefits of green-blue-grey infrastructure for sustainable urban flood risk management.

Green-blue infrastructures in urban spaces offer several co-benefits besides flood risk reduction, such as water savings, energy savings due to less cooling usage, air quality improvement and carbon sequestration. Traditionally, these co-benefits were not included in decision making processes for flood risk management. In this work we present a method to include the monetary analysis of these co-benefits into a cost-benefits analysis of flood risk mitigation measures.