An interdisciplinary approach to identify adaptation strategies that enhance flood resilience and urban liveability

This paper provides guidance on how to identify and design the most suitable climate adaptation strategies for enhancing the liveability and flood resilience of urban catchments. It presents findings from a case study of Elwood, a coastal Melbourne suburb regularly affected by flooding. The research integrates social science, architecture and environmental engineering to co-develop technical, design and policy solutions that respond to the local community’s vision for the future and are robust under a range of future climate, population and urban development scenarios. The paper shows that ensuring a city’s flood resilience involves a range of measures to retreat from, adapt to and defend against flooding; this necessarily requires an integrated approach and interdisciplinary expertise to develop adaptation pathways that are grounded in community aspirations and priorities, inspired by novel design solutions and informed by modelling of performance, robustness and economic viability.