The promise of a “people-centred” approach to floods: Types of participation in the global literature of citizen science and community-based flood risk reduction in the context of the Sendai Framework

Over the last few decades, scholars, policy makers and risk managers have been gradually acknowledging that community-based initiatives can represent a promising alternative for addressing the hazard of floods at the local scale. This article provides an original contribution to the field by documenting and reflecting on the firsthand findings of a long-term community-based program assessing flood risks conducted within the Revitalising Informal settlements and Their Environments (RISE) program. The article outlines the implementation, operation and initial findings of the project, which involved community-members in the documentation of flood-levels in informal settlements in Suva, Fiji and Makassar, Indonesia between 2018 and 2020.

The findings from the case study suggest that approaches involving communities in flood monitoring can, beyond facilitating flood documentation, unlock additional risk reduction benefits such as enhancing social capital and facilitating risk communication. The conclusions highlight that, similar to RISE’s flood monitoring project, several other community-based initiatives have been developed all over the world. While these initiatives vary significantly in the degrees of community participation and their methods, most of the literature agrees that these emerging methods are considered particularly promising in terms of improving disaster knowledge and awareness when community members participate in disaster risk reduction.