Socio-economic complexities of flood memory in building resilience: An overview of research

Shocks such as flooding are sudden events that can affect the wellbeing of people, whether it's a single household or business or the entire community. Repeated flood shocks is one of the least researched phenomena associated with understanding the socioeconomic dynamics in flood disaster but is acknowledged to be a significant factor in flood impacts. The memory within, and its dynamics interrelated with, the complex socio-ecological system is therefore the main focus of this research. It is virtually impossible to understand the dynamics of socio-economic complexities of flood memory of a system without accounting for the human dimension of vulnerability and interrelated feedbacks associated with it that alter the overall resilience within the system. The concept of memory within the context of disasters has largely been restricted to studies of a psychological nature, however, it is realized that to understand the components of adaptability in environmental, social, and economic contexts, with reference to memory and resilience to repeated physical stress, is equally important. Previous research has identified a number of factors that affect the socio-economic vulnerability of affected population but few attempts has been made to integrate the factors to develop an aggregated system structure. This research adopts a method of structured literature review to identify the concepts and scope of memory in the system and explores those multi-faceted aspects of multi-scale and multi-level processes of memory and socio-ecological patterns to identify how such complexities react to changing stresses. Based on the combined insights a new approach is presented in the form of conceptual map illustrating the need to highlight the role of memory in the process of enhanced resilience. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B. V.