Abstract
Flood risk management (FRM) is moving towards more proactive and collaborative direction to enable adaptation to changing conditions. We present a case study on collaborative planning process, which contributed to the development of adaptive FRM in one of the largest river basins in Finland. The focus was on the possibility and acceptability of using large regulated lakes as storage for flood water in an extreme flood event to decrease flood damage at the downstream riverside towns. We defined an extreme flood event that would cause dramatic flood damage and developed tools for simulating the event with alternative regulation strategies using Watershed Simulation and Forecasting System (WSFS). We organized a stakeholder event to demonstrate the alternative lake regulation strategies, their socio-economic consequences, and to discuss their acceptability. We found that storing flood water in the lakes above the regulation limits and preparing for winter floods in advance by lowering the lakes in the autumn can minimize the total damage in the target area. The majority of stakeholders considered these actions acceptable in an extreme flood event, regardless of deliberately induced flooding of areas where no floods have occurred for over 50 years. However, lowering the lakes in the autumn on annual basis gained less support. We emphasize the importance of deliberations on the FRM procedures and responsibilities in extreme flood events with the stakeholders in advance to increase adaptive capacity and legitimacy of decisions.
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Notes
We used the optimization algorithm L-BFGS. It has been well-implemented and integrated to WSFS, and has worked well in hydrological simulations. The objective function was defined as the sum of flood damage at five major flood risk areas. The L-BFGS algorithm requires the objective function to be continuous and differentiable. Therefore, we used approximated flood damage functions based on point-specific flood damage data. The constraints consisted of the lower and upper limits of discharge, and they were adjusted by the regulation experts for enabling correct timing of the discharge reduction to promote ice cover formation.
For example in Finland, the flood damage compensation is typically a responsibility of the insurance companies. However, if the authorities decide to utilize exceptional lake regulation to prevent widespread damage or danger to society, the resulting damage will be compensated by the Finnish government (Finnish Water Act 587/2011).
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Acknowledgements
This paper is a contribution from three research projects: i) ClimWater –project financed by the Finnish Academy, ii) Winland –project financed by Strategic Research Council, and iii) the BONUS GOHERR –project, which has received funding from BONUS (Art 185), funded jointly by the EU and the Academy of Finland. The authors would also like to thank all the stakeholders who contributed to the realisation of the case study, and for all the experts for their valuable input.
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Söderholm, K., Pihlajamäki, M., Dubrovin, T. et al. Collaborative Planning in Adaptive Flood Risk Management under Climate Change. Water Resour Manage 32, 1383–1397 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-017-1875-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-017-1875-3