Resilience to climate change-caused flooding—Metro Vancouver case study

Abstract

Climate variability, together with other drivers of global change (like population growth, land-use change, etc.), is affecting the management of floods. Traditional approaches are no longer sufficient to address the increased pressures that areas vulnerable to flooding are facing. A paradigm shift from flood risk reduction to flood resilience-building strategies is required. An analytical framework is developed to help quantify, compare, and visualize dynamic resilience to flooding to address some shortcomings in current resilience assessment research. The proposed methodological framework for flood resilience combines physical, economic, engineering, health, and social spatio-temporal impacts and adaptive capacities of flood-affected systems. To capture the dynamic spatio-temporal characteristics of resilience and gauge the effectiveness of potential climate change adaptation options, a flood resilience simulation tool (FRST) is developed to use the analytical framework. The FRST is applied to a case study in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The simulation model focuses on the impacts of climate change-influenced riverine flooding and sea-level rise. Simulation results suggest that various adaptation options, such as access to emergency funding, mobile hospital services, and managed retreat can all help to increase resilience to flooding. Results also suggest that, at a regional scale, Metro Vancouver is rather resilient to climate change-influenced flood hazards.