Clarifying Resilience: an invited comment

So, we all know what resilience is, don’t we? The National Academies recently said building disaster resilience capacity in our communities should be a national imperative (National Academies 2012).So resilience must be a tangible thing, right

Recommendations for changes in UK National Recovery Guidance (NRG) and associated guidance from the perspective of Lancaster University's Hull Flood Studies

This report was commissioned by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) following the publication of Lancaster University‟s Hull Flood Project and Hull Children‟s Flood Project. Its principal purpose is to identify how findings made as a result of the two research projects could be integrated into the Cabinet Office‟s National Recovery Guidance (NRG), as a means to improve affected communities‟ ability to recover from emergency events. The report, in effect, details a desktop analysis of UK Civil Protection (CP) guidance, from a bottom-up perspective (i.e. using as its critical lens, the lived experiences of members of the public who were tested by the Hull flooding of 2007 and its aftermath)

After the Rain – learning the lessons from flood recovery in Hull

The report shows that it is often not so much the floods themselves, but what comes afterwards, that people find so difficult to deal with. The research on which this report is based aimed to undertake a real-time longitudinal study to document and understand the everyday experiences of individuals following the floods of June 2007 in interaction with networks of actors and organisations, strategies of institutional support and investment in the built environment and infrastructure. It had the following objectives: - To identify and document key dimensions of the longer term experience of flood impact and flood recovery, including health, economic and social aspects. - To examine how resilience and vulnerability were manifest in the interaction between everyday strategies of adaptation during the flood recovery process, and modes of institutional support and the management of infrastructure and the built environment. -To explore to what extent the recovery process entailed the development of new forms of resilience and to identify the implications for developing local level resilience for flood recovery in the future. To develop an archive that will be accessible for future research into other aspects of flood recovery. The flooding which affected the city of Kingston-upon-Hull took place in June 2007. Over 110mm of rain fell during the biggest event, overwhelming the city‟s drainage system and resulting in widespread pluvial flooding. The floods affected over 8,600 households and one person was killed. Our research used in-depth, qualitative methods where 44 people kept weekly diaries and participated in interviews and group discussions over an 18-month period

Community Resilience Research: UK Case Studies, Lessons and Recommendations report to the Cabinet Office and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.

This report presents four case studies carried out for the Community Resilience project funded by DSTL and supported by the Civil Contingency Secretariat (CCS), Cabinet Office. The work for this project was carried out between September and December 2011. The aim of the Community Resilience project was to develop a better understanding of the role of community resilience in emergency response and recovery situations in order to inform Cabinet Office / Civil Contingencies Secretariat policy on community resilience and to inform the development of future work

Increasing resilience to storm-surge flooding : risks, trust and social networks

The overall aim of this research was to investigate relationships between risk perception and community resilience to low-probability sea-flood hazards. Importantly, the policy context within which the project was conducted was one of transition. A historical flooddefence paradigm was being replaced by one of flood-risk management; this shift being predicated upon inclusivity and a wish to empower individuals to acknowledge and mitigate their own flood risks. However, existing indices had identified disproportionate levels of social flood vulnerability within communities exposed to extreme sea-flood hazards. Therefore, it was important to investigate how such populations were engaging (or not) with this policy shift. Three case-study sites, Mablethorpe, Cleveleys and Morecambe (UK), were chosen for more detailed research in a mixed-method investigation. Initially, a survey was used to quantify the populations' risk perceptions and flood resilience, by examining levels of hazard awareness and preparedness. Having quantified these phenomena in breadth, focus-groups were used to add interpretative depth to the investigation. Using social capital theory, it was possible to identify elements of the concept within these populations. However, it was found that the informal social networks that are constructed with this capital have little influence in building community resilience to flood hazards. Rather, they operate to maintain existing perceptions of risk and responsibility, with resilience appearing to be more directly related to personal hazard experience. III Introducing climate change as a risk factor revealed important differences in the way future flood hazards are perceived. That sea flooding is regarded as 'natural' and surface-water flooding as being due to human mismanagement, introduces an important twin perspective on risk and how it should be discussed. The role of trust in authority was also identified as fundamental within the social construction of flood risk, with the legacy of floodplain development revealed as a principal factor in explaining the low levels of risk engagement. Recommendations are made in relation to how risk management and communication practice might be improved in light of these findings. It is also recommended that effort should be focused upon making planning policy and decision-making processes more transparent, in order to draw coastal communities into open dialogue. To be effective in promoting resilience, such dialogue must both acknowledge hazard exposure and honestly address the challenges and trade-offs that this exposure adds to already complex considerations surrounding community sustainability.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Placing the flood recovery process

This chapter argues that, if we want to understand the recovery process then it is essential to think about just exactly what it is that is being recovered. Our case study is a qualitative, longitudinal study of people’s recovery from the floods of June 2007 in Kingston-upon-Hull, UK, in which over 8600 households were affected and one man died (Coulthard et al 2007). The aim of the research was to discover what the long term disaster recovery process was like for people as they struggled to get their lives and homes back on track

embrace (WP5) Case Study Report: Floods in Northern England

As one of 5 case studies into community resilience undertaken as part of the emBRACE project across Europe, this study was carried out with the participation and assistance of members of a complex amalgamation of geographical, interest and practice communities situated along the catchment of the River Derwent in the county of Cumbria, north England. What these investigations also revealed quite clearly was that resilience, as it is defined by the IPCC (2014) is powerfully represented along this catchment. It has, however, been won over a period of years through the experience of repeated (flood) events. It has also been won at higher cost to those directly impacted by those events than to those who have not been. There is clear evidence of the capacity exhibited by the catchment’s social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a high magnitude flood event as well as with other disturbances. They have also responded to and reorganised themselves in ways that maintain their essential function, identity, and structure and they have adapted and learned, while also perhaps maintaining a capacity for transformation that may only truly be operationalised once some future tipping point is crossed. Whether the next high-magnitude flood to strike pushes one or more of the communities studied here over that remaining threshold remains difficult to assess

UK Civil Protection Guidance Inventory Phase 1: Final Report.

The NRE Guidance Inventory (henceforth the NRE-GI) is the principal product of the Cabinet Office UK Civil Protection Guidance Inventory Project. The intended purpose of the NRE-GI is for it to be integrated within the National Resilience Extranet, where it will become a valuable knowledge base for all Civil Protection practitioners. The principal focus of the project was to identify published guidance, which could be defined as civil protection doctrine, but which also held relevance for more than one organisation, agency or group, i.e. it needed to inform a multi-agency Integrated Emergency Management (IEM) approach