{"id":2009,"date":"2018-02-07T19:23:18","date_gmt":"2018-02-07T19:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iawatercenter.wordpress.com\/?p=2009"},"modified":"2018-02-07T19:23:18","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T19:23:18","slug":"the-realms-of-flood-resilience-protecting-our-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iowawatercenter.org\/the-realms-of-flood-resilience-protecting-our-communities\/","title":{"rendered":"The Realms of Flood Resilience: protecting our communities"},"content":{"rendered":"
Post submitted by Craig Just<\/a>,\u00a0assistant professor for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa and Ashlee Johannes<\/a>,\u00a0coordinator for the Iowa Watershed Approach Flood Resilience Program.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n How can we become more flood resilient?<\/strong><\/p>\n Community resilience is a recent desire for communities that face a serious disruption in their routine. But, what is resilience? A resilient community is able to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from an adverse event, including floods. The Iowa Watershed Approach (IWA) Flood Resilience Team views resilience in terms of six \u201cresources\u201d\u2014social, human, institutional, natural, economic, and physical. A community\u2019s resilience depends on its capacities in each of these areas, as well as the engagement and unity of its citizens.<\/p>\n During the first year of the IWA, the Flood Resilience Team trekked 10,000-miles, crisscrossing the state of Iowa and visiting diverse watershed communities to recognize their progress and understand their hurdles towards building a resilient community. In the process, our team observed a common resource that was missing in their actions: social resilience. Social resilience, at a community scale, is challenging to describe and quantify, so we have committed our focus to this topic. Our flood resilience programming has three goals that all strive towards improving social resources, and other resilience resources, for the IWA watersheds: 1) measure, visualize, and communicate flood resilience resources; 2) enhance flood resilience content in formal watershed plans; and 3) improve social resources of flood resilience.<\/p>\n A critical action for the Flood Resilience Team is the creation of interactive maps that display social vulnerability at the intersections of flood risk for each IWA watershed. With this information, watershed representatives can identify areas of high social vulnerability (or lower resilience). Furthermore, users will be able to pinpoint the underlying drivers of the vulnerable area (e.g., prominently low-income neighborhoods, people with disabilities, large children population) for targeted outreach and emergency response purposes. We will also empower community planners to use this information to implement flood mitigation strategies that protect socially vulnerable populations.<\/p>\n