Development of Resilience Framework and Respective Tool for Urban Stormwater Services

Abstract

Resilience theory has gained significant traction in various urban fields, including natural disasters and risk management or climate change adaptation, and at different organizational levels, including academics, practitioners, and policymakers. It should be considered a complementary approach to sustainable development that enhances cities’ capacity to endure future uncertainties and promote rational urban development. However, the lack of a generally accepted definition of resilience hampers understanding and practical implementation in urban services like stormwater management. Conventionally, stormwater services aimed to minimize the impact of rainfall through fail-safe approaches. The resilience approach, on the other hand, embraces a holistic “safe-to-fail” perspective. The existing literature offers diverse approaches to measure flood and stormwater resilience. Still, there is room for the development and improvement of standardized but flexible frameworks for operationalizing resilience in urban drainage and flood management. To address this, a comprehensive resilience framework for urban stormwater services is proposed, entitled RESILISTORM. This framework incorporates a Strategic Dimension and a Performance Dimension, providing segmented and overall resilience ratings that enable utilities to address critical aspects undermining the service’s resilience. An open-source digital tool (RESILISTORM-tool) is also introduced to expedite answering, data integration, and visualization analysis of results.