The role of risk transfer and spatial planning for enhancing the flood resilience of cities

Abstract

Increasing urbanisation results in more people and assets being placed in harm's way of flooding. However, these trends can be counteracted by land-use planning inside (peri-)urban areas and access to risk-transfer mechanisms, such as insurance or government compensation schemes. Risk-transfer mechanisms provide compensation helping people recover faster after a flood event or potentially provide incentives to alter their level of precautionary behaviour. Both mechanism avenues improve the ability to improve flood-risk management by improving resilience of the urban system across three pillars: recovery (the ability to return to the pre-flood state), resistance (the ability to lower flood impacts), and adaptive capacity (the ability to learn and positively transform the flood-risk management system). The series of examples presented in this chapter suggest that both ex-ante risk-transfer and urban planning require systemic approaches to be successful, which creates the potential for synergies. Integrating both instruments leads to a more resilient society.