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Non-structural Flood Protection and Sustainability Floods are natural events and will continue to occur in the future. Despite the progress of technology and multi-billion expenditures on flood protection, one can never achieve complete safety. Yet, the flood risk can be seriously restricted, if an appropriate preparedness system is built. The attempt to reach a (relative) safety at any cost, based on structural means alone cannot be a perfect solution in most vulnerable sites. Structural measures help reduce the flood risk, but further reduction via non-structural measures is usually indispensable. Flood protection can be considered in the sustainability context. On the one hand, floods destroy continuity of human material growth and jeopardize sustainable development, whose one definition refers to "non-decreasing quality of life". Indeed, floods may considerably worsen the quality of human life. The sustainability can be measured by the coping capacity and the rate of system recovery (resilience). On the other hand, following the most common Brundtland´s definition of sustainable development, one should not choose policies, which could be rated by future generations as inappropriate options of flood defense. This is how several structural flood protection systems are looked upon. More sustainable is to keep water where it falls (i. e. by increasing storage volume in the catchment) and, if there is no way to stop abundant water masses flowing into a river and spilling overbank, to (re-) create the possibility of benign inundation, keeping losses low. If re-naturalized wetlands and floodplains are inundated, it is more of a blessing than a curse. Even if there is no consensus as to the choice of criteria and indicators of sustainable development (which will be discussed in this contribution), it can be clearly seen that non-structural flood protection options are perfectly reversible and more sustainable than structural ones. Such measures as source control (watershed / landscape structure management), therein: extending permeable areas and flood proofing may require some small-scale structural inputs, yet can also be rated as sustainable. So does the entirety of non-structural, i.e."soft" measures: laws and regulations, standards, zoning, efficient flood forecast-warning system, system of flood risk assessment, flood-related data bases. Actions enabling change of public attitude are of importance, therein, capacity building and improving flood awareness. Among over 50 fatalities of the 1997 flood in Poland, many could have been avoided, were the awareness better. Half of flood fatalities in the US are related to vehicles whose drivers underestimate the danger. When adequate flood protection cannot be assured (e.g. due to unaffordable costs), moving out of harms way is definitely a viable option in the sustainable development spirit. This is a welcome element of non-structural approach - programmes of buying out most vulnerable properties and restoring or re-naturalizing wetlands or flood plains - areas which could benefit of being inundated.
Non-structural measures, being flexible and reversible lend themselves well to application in climate change adaptation strategies. As uncertainty in assessment of impacts of climate change is high, flexibility of adaptation strategies is a property in high demand. |