Building REsilience to Multi-source Flooding in South/Southeast Asia through a Technology-informed Community-based approacH (REMATCH)

Due to the prevailing monsoon, abundant river systems and long coastlines, floods, as a result of multiple drivers (commonly including heavy rainfall, typhoons and tropical storms) repeatedly affect millions of people in many Southeast/South Asian countries each year. There is an urgent need to develop and implement effective risk communication and management strategies to prepare the local communities for future floods, i.e. improve awareness, reduce vulnerability, mitigate impacts, and save life, and eventually develop resilience. Through actively involving community members throughout the decision-making and implementation processes, community-based disaster risk management (CBDRM) provides a cost-effective bottom-up means to improve the awareness of communities about risks, provide them with access to collective resources and knowledge, and develop community-based preparedness and adaption/mitigation programmes. CBDRM has been implemented in Southeast/South Asian countries to reduce the impacts of flooding and develop community resilience. However, existing CBDRM projects have rarely taken advantage of the latest remote sensing products, high-performance computing for flood prediction and citizen science/crowd sourcing technologies, which have experienced substantial advancement particularly in the last decade. Collectively, these provide the potential to significantly advance the current CBDRM practice.

The overarching aim of REMATCH is to take on the exciting and timely opportunity from recent scientific and technological advances and develop an innovative and effective community-based flood risk management strategy to create a step change in building community resilience to flooding from multiple sources. Specifically in this foundation-building project we will 1) assemble an inter-disciplinary research team and establish an extensive researcher-stakeholder partnership to develop effective approaches to co-produce/share knowledge, communicate and manage risk, and enhance community resilience to flooding; 2) apply a multi-hazard risk analysis framework to quantify flood risk and understand the key drivers of flood hazards; 3) investigate and understand the historical and cultural implications for contemporary resilience building and impacts on socio-economic development; 4) adopt a citizen science approach to scope a pilot community-based flood forecasting and warning system based on crowd-sourced and remote-sensing data streams and real-time flood modelling technology; and 5) identify the major challenges in developing community resilience and develop a preliminary approach to measuring community flood resilience. These research objectives will be achieved through a carefully designed research programme, and implemented and tested in a case study site in Vietnam. During the project, we will also evaluate the feasibility for implementation in Bangladesh and other Southeast/South Asian countries for the full GCRF proposal.

The project's focus is on researching new ways to connect community knowledge with advances in science and technology (e.g. remote-sensing, innovative natural and human systems modelling technologies, citizen science) to increase community resilience to multi-source flooding in Southeast/South Asia. Many stakeholders have been engaged in the development stages. Beneficiaries include:
- At risk communities in our case study site, An Giang;
- Local/regional/national stakeholders in flood risk management in Southeast/South Asia;
- Flood risk management organizations in Southeast/South Asia;
- Interdisciplinary researchers in natural hazard assessment and community-based hazard management.

Key benefits of the proposed research include:
- Quality of life: The research will provide a sustainable community-based disaster risk management (CBDRM) framework to increase local resilience, and to engage the public effectively in exploring issues for ownership, individual values, and preparedness.
- Public policy and legislator impacts: The project will engage policy-makers in Flood Management in Vietnam and Bangladesh, producing policy relevant outputs.
- Socio-economic benefits: The project will work directly with the local/regional government in the pilot study site to demonstrate practical ways to improve CBDRM for reducing socio-economic impacts of flood hazards.
- Development of community awareness: It will develop citizens' skills in monitoring/understanding risk, through the use of citizen science approaches.
- Development of scientific knowledge: The research will enhance scientists' communication skills across disciplines/cultures, and broaden scientific knowledge/skills in non-expert constituencies. Benefits will occur for those working in science and community-based sectors in widening understanding of each other's domains.
- Access to cutting-edge science: Vietnamese and Bangladeshi communities, professionals and academics will have access to scientific outcomes from the project.