Sustainable flood memories

Sustainable flood memory emphasises the importance of remembering and learning from past flood events to enhance community resilience and adaptive strategies.

Sustainable flood memories and the development of community resilience to future flood risk

1 Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience, College of Arts, Technology and Environment, University of West England Bristol, United Kingdom

2 School of Media and Communication, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

3 School of Humanities, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom

4 Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany

Funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council from 2011 to 2015, the Sustainable Flood Memories (SFM) project created a conceptual framework to enhance community resilience against flooding. SFM empowers communities to navigate flood risk management through local knowledge and collective memory. The lessons learned from the SFM project provided insights for building a more resilient future by engaging communities, preserving local knowledge, and fostering adaptive learning.

SFM acknowledges the importance of individual and community experiences with flooding.

Lindsey McEwen and others (2016) described how sustainable flood memories can come from many sources including (page 17):

narratives, oral and archived histories, physical marks, artefacts and material practices in the landscape, and media representing floods, comprising folk memories, autobiographical accounts, personal stories and anecdotes of previous floods (routine–severe) and their impacts.

The project had 2 components. The first was a comparative study of 3 communities that experienced flooding involving local council members, flood action group representatives, and emergency services. The project culminated in a conceptual framework for SFM emphasising the role of local knowledge and experiences in decision-making processes.