Abstract
Flood disasters are the most frequent and devastating natural disaster in the Asia region, and like disasters in general, their impacts have grown in spite of our improved ability to monitor and describe them (White et al. 2001). For the past thirty years the number of flood disasters has increased compared to other forms of disaster. China and India are the most frequently affected followed by Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Iran, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Pakistan.
Climate change compounds the existing challenges of managing floods. Firstly, the anticipated sea level rises could have a major impact on flood risks in the coastal zone deltas of southern and eastern Asia in which many of the larger human settlements and key rice growing areas occur (IPCC 2001). Secondly, but less certainly, increases in the frequency or intensity of extreme precipitation events exacerbate risks of disastrous flooding both in upland watersheds where such events can trigger landslides, and in lower floodplains which are often densely settled (IPCC 2001;Kundzewicz and Schellnhuber 2004). Critical regions include the flood plains of major rivers like the Ganges-Brahmaputra, Mekong and Yangtze basins, and in cyclone-prone coastal region, around the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea (Few et al. 2004). Thirdly, climate change may alter flood regimes in some basins in other more complex ways, for example, through impacts on melting of glaciers in the uppermost reaches or reduced precipitation in inland continental areas. Reductions in duration or changes in timing of onset of seasonal floods may have as large an impact on livelihoods and production systems as more discrete high water events although the former is rarely recognized as a disaster. Finally, concurrent changes in land- and water-use may exacerbate or reduce effects of changes in climate on disaster risks.
Not all social groups are equally vulnerable to flood-related disasters nor are they exposed to the same combinations of involuntary risks (Blaikie et al. 1994). Floods that are a disaster to an urban-based trading firm may even be a bounty for fisher-farming household. While physical geographies and livelihood dependencies matter, formal and informal institutions also help shape differences in risk and vulnerability to floods and climate change as well as more broadly adaptive capacities, and each of these influences is multi- and cross-scale (Adger 1999; Adger et al. 2005). A good example is insurance, both the formal kinds provided by large firms in industrialized economies, and the various kinds social safety nets that may exist in traditional agricultural societies.
Our primary concern in this paper is how institutions concerned with the management of floods and flood-related disaster risks will fare under a changed climate. Our approach is first to look at how well they have evolved in the recent past, and then to imagine a future where climate change through altering flood regimes is testing systems of governance. Ultimately, we are looking for insights about how the form and arrangement of current institutions concerned with the management of floods and flood-related disaster risks might be transformed in ways that would them more able to learn and adapt to a climate change as, and however, it unfolds.
Our exploration is guided by a framework based on ideas about vulnerability and resilience but which emphasizes the ways in which other actors through institutions modify the risks of flood disasters and who will bear those risks (Figure 1). For initial simplicity we focus on three main groups of pathways: (1) perceptions - discourses and social practices that shape how floods, risks and disasters are perceived; (2) vulnerabilities – institutional arrangements that influence who is at risk to flood and other interacting stressors (3) capacities - institutional influences on the capacity to cope and adapt. Taken together these comprise a substantial if not comprehensive view of how governance frames risks to floods and flood-related disasters.
The way the risks of flood disasters are governed has changed with time. If societies are to be effective in dealing with climate change some of the underlying institutions and political structures may also need to change. An adaptive transition is one in which the fit between key institutions and the risks of flood disasters is maintained or improved. There are several ways in which institutional responses to floods and flood disasters may undermine longer-term capacities of societies to cope and adapt to altered flood regimes arising from climate change. For example, there is an undue emphasis on emergency response, because this is highly visible and politically popular action, whereas investments in prevention and risk reduction pass unnoticed. The consequence is that institutional changes which could reduce risks aren’t taken because the pay-offs of doing so are less immediate. These institutional traps could make adaptive transitions difficult.
We argue that several kinds of institutional traps need to be avoided for adaptive transitions to be plausible. Here we consider how changes to governance may help avoid these traps while also building capacities of societies to cope with and adapt to altered flood disaster risks from climate change. For instance, studies of organizational learning suggest that there are many obstacles to learning under conditions where evaluating costs and benefits of different adaptation options is difficult and there is little feedback on success or failure of measures (Berkhout et al. 2004). Societies learn about climate change and its impacts on flood regimes and the uncertainties therein in different ways and this is likely to have different repercussions for institutional responses. Societies that are anticipatory and cautionary invest in forward-looking research looking for ways to build coping and adaptive capacities of the most vulnerable groups, sectors and places. Societies that are reactionary may delay actions until a crisis is of sufficient magnitude that action is seen as unavoidable. What specific characteristics will be important for capacities to adapt to floods will always be uncertain (Adger and Vincent 2005) making learning crucial. Democratizing approaches to disaster management appear important for creating learning institutions.
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