ReliefWeb

Summary

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA) has developed an approach that combines state-of-the-art collaborative digital mapping techniques with community-based participatory methods. The process engages a broad range of actors such as local volunteers, local government, and national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), with digital mapping experts to co-produce critical local flood exposure information. Applications to communities in Nepal, Peru, and Mexico demonstrate the immense potential for making an essential contribution to building community resilience.

Key Learnings

1 Critical data gaps can be closed
Integrating web-based remote collaborative mapping and community-based participatory mapping offers an opportunity to comprehensively produce spatial information on resources and capacities of communities at local scales. This critical information is currently missing in many developing countries.

2 Mapping identifies local resources and needs
Detailed, geographically referenced information on safe shelters, health posts, schools, raised hand pumps, culverts, and elevated open spaces captures existing capacities of flood-prone communities, and helps to identify key capacity gaps.

3 Stakeholder participation is essential
By enhancing stakeholder engagement and public participation, integrated digital mapping offers an effective way to coproduce knowledge on disaster risks and impacts whilst mapping out existing physical and natural characteristics and capital of disaster-prone communities.

4 Flood exposure information strengthens resilience
Enhanced flood exposure information improves the understanding of flood risk beyond political and administrative boundaries at the wider basin scale and supports a more holistic resilience building programme. This integrates emergency preparedness with long-term risk management and land use planning in vulnerable communities.

5 The approach is replicable
If up-scaled, this approach can fill critical data gaps for validating global and regional flood model outputs, supporting the production of reliable local flood inundation maps, and helping to build flood resilience from local to national levels.