Community perspectives of flood risk and social vulnerability reduction : the case of the Red River Basin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been a decade since the 1997 Red River Flood of the Century in Manitoba Canada. Since the event federal, provincial and local efforts have improved emergency management procedures, structural and non-structural flood mitigation, and the public's awareness of response and recovery plans. They have significantly reduced the exposure of the regional population to similar large-scale flood events. However, there has been an institutional failure to address social vulnerability that affects community resilience and the capacity to cope with uncertainty in the floodplain. In these contexts the purpose of this study was to explore community-based risk management approaches to reducing social vulnerability through planning and communication linkages (to raise public awareness and mobilize action), bottom-up activity (experience, involvement, and application) and floodplain management partnerships. The objectives of the study were to: 1) identify residual floodplain issues that affect risk acceptance and partnership development among floodplain stakeholders; 2) explain the processes of social vulnerability that affect community capacity to cope with flood risk in the Red River Basin; 3) assess social vulnerability at the community level; and, 4) develop policy recommendations and community-based plans to reduce social vulnerability. A goal of the research was to develop a new conceptual framework of social vulnerability in the context of flooding and the floodplain environment. Using interviews, surveys and a local decision-makers' forum, the methodological approach contributed to participatory action research by engaging floodplain stakeholders in identifying social vulnerability and developing operational tools for anticipatory risk management. The findings indicate that residents and municipal managers have a good deal of knowledge and experience regarding local risk and hazards in the floodplain and know how to reduce vulnerable conditions at the household and community levels. It is the external pressures from regional floodplain policy and development that restricts local action and empowerment, and reduces the public's tolerance for risk management initiatives and partnership development. Significant variations in residents' perceptions of risk and what makes them vulnerable in the floodplain have developed between urban and rural communities, between geographical locations in the rural setting (i.e. private farm and river lots and rural communities), and among different socio-economic groups (i.e. age, income and employment characterisitics). Policy recommendations highlight the need for local-level information generation and communication processes to identify and assess vulnerable pathways to a range of ongoing risks. Local action can first be initiated through regular community involvement in water resource conservation initiatives and sustainable planning opportunities that strengthen social networks and enhance rural representation in regional floodplain management and decision-making. Provincial policy is needed to develop broad standards for the social dimensions of vulnerability in the floodplain, and to provide opportunities to mediate existing management conflicts that hinder partnership development and action between communities and provincial agencies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".