Resilience & Community - New Research

And when you started out, did you have a plan?

So in the first year for the PhD, you do lots of literature review.

So trying to find out what's there out there and quickly you find out that there's very little when it comes to groundwater flooding.

And obviously the project was the first of its kind in England.

In my first year, I lobbied to have this sort of comparison between Uganda and England.

When it comes to resilience, context matters.

Also when you talk about engagement, context matters because communities are different.

I thought it would be interesting to compare and see what's going on in these two unique different contexts.

Back to then working on Project Groundwater, you developed a resilience framework.

So resilience, I'll start with the definition of resilience, the one I use.

So one, it is to resist floods, to absorb and recover the or respond to floods, or to adapt and change.

So in other words, it is stopping floods, withstanding, or learning and changing.

And the interesting thing is that the term resilience For example, in my study or in Uganda, it does not have a direct local dialect.

So I had to break it down definitely to these communities for them to understand what I'm talking about.

So I had to break it down into those things.

So what helps you, for example, to stop floods? What helps you to withstand floods? What helps you to learn from, to adapt to floods? So I guess that is the simplest way you can talk about resilience in practice.

Which is a really useful thing because it becomes a buzzword, doesn't it? Everyone talks about resilience, even not in the flood and climate world.

We talk to our children about being resilient and do they really know what it means? Probably not.

We have to break things down and you have to make it personal, don't you? Otherwise, it just becomes a term that gets glossed over.

I agree.

I agree.

So to understand resilience, I had to develop a sort of framework, which is looking at six things, six resources, basically, that communities can draw upon in order to better stop floods, better manage floods, better withstand floods.

So things like maybe local knowledge, ownership, skills, any skills that can help you to stop floods, any sort of awareness, basically.

Awareness is a major one.

then we come to the social capacity it's more to do with the networks or the relationships between communities or between community and government then when you come to the economic capacity that is a bit more straightforward these are the funds available to communities to manage floods institutional capacity is more with the governance government leadership government funding for example for defra or for buckinghamshire council to manage floods then we have the natural and the physical the natural again that is the nature-based solutions tree planting western restoration Physical is more of the infrastructure that helps, for example, the flood walls, flood dikes, or property for resilience, more on the small scale.