The primary objectives of flood mitigation are to protect lives, minimize property damage, and reduce the economic and social disruption caused by flooding.
Understanding Flood Mitigation Objectives
Flood mitigation encompasses a range of strategies and actions designed to lessen the potential impacts of flood events. These objectives guide planning and implementation efforts at various levels, from individual properties to regional scales.
Effective flood mitigation aims to achieve several key goals:
- Safeguarding Human Life: The foremost objective is to ensure the safety of residents and emergency responders during and after a flood event. This involves reducing the risk of injury or death.
- Reducing Property and Economic Losses: Mitigation efforts seek to decrease the financial burden of floods by protecting buildings, infrastructure, agriculture, and businesses from damage. This includes both direct damage and indirect losses due to disruption.
- Minimizing Disruption to Infrastructure and Services: Ensuring the continued operation of essential services like utilities, transportation networks, and communication systems is a critical objective to support response and recovery efforts and maintain community function.
- Promoting Community Resilience: Building the capacity of communities to withstand, adapt to, and recover quickly from flood events is a long-term objective. This involves planning, preparedness, and education.
Non-Structural Mitigation Objectives
As highlighted by the reference, a significant part of flood mitigation focuses on changing human behaviour and interaction with flood-prone areas. The purpose of non-structural flood mitigation is to change the way that people interact with the floodplain, flood risk, and also aim to move people away from flood-prone areas.
Specific objectives within non-structural approaches include:
- Altering Land Use: Discouraging or preventing development in the most flood-prone areas.
- Changing Exposure: Reducing the number of people and assets located within flood-prone zones. The reference explicitly mentions the aim to move people away from flood-prone areas.
- Adapting Existing Structures: Making buildings more resistant to flood damage without relying on large engineering works. Examples include elevating structures.
- Improving Preparedness and Awareness: Educating individuals and communities about flood risks and what actions they can take before, during, and after a flood. The reference mentions in-depth community flood planning as a project type.
- Utilizing Floodplain Functions: Maintaining or restoring natural floodplain functions that can help absorb floodwaters and provide environmental benefits, such as maintaining floodplain as open space.
Structural Mitigation Objectives
While the reference focuses on non-structural methods, traditional structural mitigation also has distinct objectives, often complementing non-structural efforts:
- Controlling or Diverting Floodwaters: Using physical barriers or channels to prevent water from reaching vulnerable areas or to route it safely away.
- Reducing Flood Depths and Velocities: Engineering works designed to slow down water flow or spread it over a larger, less damaging area.
Both structural and non-structural measures work together to achieve the overarching objectives of flood mitigation, focusing on reducing both the likelihood and the consequences of flooding.
