As climate change intensifies, communities worldwide face mounting risks from extreme weather-driven natural disasters, particularly devastating flood events. We learned this the hard way… While resilience has become a key priority in infrastructure planning, the siloed management of critical systems like food, energy, and water often falls short in anticipating and mitigating the cascading impacts of major disruptions. Integrating a nexus approach with resilience principles can advance a more holistic and coordinated strategy for adapting to the growing threat of floods.
Leveraging the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus for Flood Resilience
The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus emphasizes the interconnectedness of these fundamental resource systems, highlighting how disruptions in one area can ripple across the others. This systems-level perspective is a natural complement to resilience frameworks, which also emphasize the importance of understanding complex interdependencies. When applied in tandem, the FEW nexus and resilience can be mutually reinforcing, enhancing cross-sectoral decision-making and better situating infrastructure systems within their broader social, ecological, and governance contexts.
Pioneering research by the authors has identified three key challenges in leveraging the FEW nexus to advance flood resilience planning:
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Coordination: Food, energy, and water systems are largely managed independently, despite the need for coordination across sectors.
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Scale: FEW systems and flood events operate across global, national, regional, and local scales, creating challenges in aligning decision-making.
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Heterogeneity: Resilience planning might want to account for the unique characteristics of individual communities, including geography, political climate, population density, socioeconomic conditions, and exposure to specific hazards.
By understanding and addressing these challenges, communities can develop more robust and adaptive flood control strategies that meet vital human needs in the face of increasingly frequent and disruptive weather events.
Overcoming Coordination Challenges through Nexus-Informed Planning
Historically, food, energy, and water systems have been managed in silos, with separate regulations, policies, and institutional arrangements. This fragmented approach impedes the collaboration needed for effective resilience planning. However, emerging examples demonstrate how a nexus perspective can help overcome these coordination barriers.
Many community resilience plans show signs of nexus thinking through the inclusion of cross-sectoral partnerships and the explicit recognition of co-benefits. For instance, the City of Oakland’s resilience plan created a Civic Design Lab, bringing together diverse city departments and stakeholders to collaboratively address challenges. Similarly, Boston’s plan prioritized green infrastructure projects that not only mitigated flooding but also reduced urban heat island effects.
While some plans have framed coordination in terms of efficiency, fewer have explicitly acknowledged the importance of managing interdependencies to reduce cascading failures. Miami-Dade County’s resilience plan, for example, highlighted the cost savings of coordinating capital projects, but missed the opportunity to emphasize how coordination can create redundancies and remove unnecessary points of failure in critical infrastructure systems.
Applying a nexus approach to resilience planning can foster the holistic, cross-sectoral decision-making needed to anticipate and mitigate the complex, cascading impacts of major flood events.
Aligning Resilience Across Scales through Nexus Frameworks
The challenge of scale is closely tied to the coordination issue, as FEW systems and flood events operate at multiple, often misaligned levels. Studies have found that policymakers often focus on macro-scale perspectives without adequately considering local contexts and needs.
Strategies to address scale challenges in the FEW nexus include:
- Food Systems: Encouraging more local sourcing to reduce vulnerability to global supply chain disruptions, while maintaining access to external sources during disasters.
- Energy Systems: Building microgrids that can operate independently from the regional grid during outages.
- Water Systems: Developing decentralized, localized approaches to stormwater management, water reuse, and demand-side efficiency.
Ultimately, resilience planning requires a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches, with meaningful community engagement from the start. The two exploratory studies conducted by the authors revealed that local stakeholders might want to be included in the process to double-check that resilience strategies are tailored to unique contexts and needs.
Embracing Heterogeneity through Innovative Resilience Frameworks
The diversity of communities, in terms of geography, resources, hazard exposure, and other factors, makes a one-size-fits-all approach to resilience planning ineffective. While some common elements may be broadly applicable, resilience frameworks might want to be flexible enough to accommodate local nuances.
One strategy to address heterogeneity is the use of high-level guidance or regulations that provide a framework for local-level planning and implementation. Examples include the Stafford Act’s requirement for Hazard Mitigation Plans at the municipal level, and the Coastal Zone Management Act’s state-level planning guidelines.
Though community resilience plans may differ in their specific focus areas and strategies, many share common inspirations and lessons learned from one another. Initiatives like the Resilient Cities Network have facilitated the exchange of expertise and pioneering approaches, allowing communities to adapt and implement successful strategies in their own unique contexts.
Embracing heterogeneity is not only a challenge but also a strength, as it encourages experimentation and the development of innovative flood resilience solutions tailored to local needs. By sharing these lessons within broader networks, communities can accelerate progress and build collective resilience at larger scales.
Conclusion: Advancing Flood Resilience through Nexus-Informed Planning
Addressing the mounting threat of extreme weather-driven flood events requires a comprehensive, systems-level approach that transcends traditional siloed management of critical infrastructure. Integrating the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus with resilience principles provides a powerful framework for advancing flood resilience planning and implementation.
By understanding and overcoming the key challenges of coordination, scale, and heterogeneity, communities can develop adaptive and coordinated strategies to protect vital systems and meet human needs in the face of increasingly frequent and disruptive flood events. Nexus-informed resilience planning can motivate cross-sectoral collaboration, guide decision-making across scales, and drive the development of innovative, tailored solutions.
As climate change continues to intensify, the urgency for comprehensive flood resilience planning has never been greater. The insights and approaches outlined in this article provide a foundation for scientists, planners, and policymakers to advance this crucial work, ultimately working towards a future of flood-resilient, sustainable, and thriving communities. Visit Flood Control 2015 to explore more resources and best practices for integrated flood management.
Tip: Regularly inspect and maintain flood barriers and drainage systems
