The need for resilience has become a strategic decision-making priority globally to tackle the emerging and more frequent natural and man-made challenges, such as rapid urbanisation, increasing population, climate change and other socio-political challenges. In the case of extreme weather events, the impacts on people and communities are growing increasingly severe due to the rising frequency and intensity of events like floods and droughts, which are a consequence of climate change (Vermij, 2023).
Many approaches, techniques, and policies have been presented to increase cities’ resilience and reduce risk exposure. However, as stated by Martens and Carvalho (2023), “many organisations simply do not know where to start their climate resilience journey due to the complexity and multiplicity of the topic”. Digital tools have been presented as a growing and promising approach to help actions to be taken at different stages of the resilience cycle and can be enablers to organisations to prepare themselves against the impacts of climate change (Martens & Carvalho, 2023).
This white paper aims to present inspiring experiences of how digital tools have helped the process of urban resilience to floods in different contexts. The authors hope that these experiences can promote and inspire new success stories. The document presents the background to the problems of extreme flooding in the urban context and climate change, in order to aid understanding of the main associated risks. Subsequently, the different steps of the resilience cycle in which digital tools can help optimise the process are presented. This is followed by case studies related to the use of these tools to build resilience to floods. Finally, the main lessons learned from these experiences and recommendations for future applications are presented.
Authors:
- Marina Batalini de Macedo, Federal University of Itajubá, Brazil
- Jyoti Gautam, Netaji Subhas University of Technology, India
- Sheilla de Carvalho, Royal Haskoning DHV, Singapore
- Pilar Conejos, Idrica and Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
