Preface

The recent decades have seen a significant increase in the number of large-scale water-related disasters that have caused considerable impacts on our life and society.

Flood disasters pose both direct impacts (e.g. loss of life, damage to buildings, crops and infrastructure) and indirect impacts (e.g. disruption of livelihood, losses in productivity, and human health impacts such as heightened anxiety, anger, and depression). They also cause both short-term impacts (e.g. infectious diseases outbreaks, disruptions in business operations) and long-term impacts (e.g. psychological consequences for victims, fatal injury, permanent shutdown of businesses, population decline). Furthermore, these impacts are associated with various spatial scales, which may render flood impact assessment ineffectual.

Although various efforts have been made so far to mitigate the impacts of flood disasters, leading to significant reductions in flood fatalities, the economic cost of flood disasters has been skyrocketing and we are still at the mercy of nature in the sense that we are not successful at mitigating the pattern of heavy storms causing large-scale disasters and resulting in profound consequences. The countless repeat of disaster-reconstruction-disaster again signifies that conventional prevention and reconstruction approaches have come to their limit. A regime shift in flood management through innovation is critical and indispensable for forging a better tomorrow.

It is now well agreed that innovation for better flood management is resilience building and enhancement. The resilience strategy is much more than resistance and is more about how to survive a large-scale disaster and make a comeback in even better shape. Resistance may be broken if the force is too large. However, resilience can cope with unprecedented events by adaption and evolution. It also provides a significant incentive for governments to focus more attention on nonstructural countermeasures.

This book is mainly intended to deepen the understanding of the resilience concept and disseminate information related to the latest developments in resilience building and enhancement for impact mitigation.

Meeting the challenges associated with water-related disasters today requires intellectual commitment towards knowledge fusion because the causes of flood disasters have become ever more complicated and diversified due to human activities. Despite achievements through previous efforts, scaling these up or transforming them into practice to meet current and future needs remains a central challenge.

Therefore, this book also serves as a call for further studies on resilience and its application to flood management, with the additional hope that the contents inspire young researchers to plunge into this academic endeavor.

> **Guangwei Huang** Professor of the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Director of the Institute for Studies of the Global Environment, Sophia University, Japan

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Section 1

Conceptualization of

Resilience

## Section 1
