Floods are destructive. But even so, flood prone areas are generally the most developed areas around the world (e.g. coasts, river deltas, flood plains, hilly valleys). This indicates that human societies are able to manage flood impacts and live with floods, i.e. human societies hold a capacity of resilience to floods. The emerging scientific concept of flood resilience specifically targets this phenomenon, but it is yet far too little developed to be of substantial use. The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Flood Resilience (STORIES) project aims to establish a fundamental theory and methodology for the field and lead its frontier.
Existing approaches often treat resilience as a static condition rather than as an evolving process shaped by behavioral adaptation, governance interactions, and socio-economic change. Against this backdrop, STORIES seeks to advance a new scientific understanding of flood resilience as a dynamic, multi-scalar, and socially embedded phenomenon. The project’s overall objective is to develop innovative frameworks and empirically informed models that reveal how flood resilience evolves over time and across scales—from households and communities to urban systems and river basins. Combining fieldwork, historical analysis, and computational modeling, STORIES integrates data from diverse contexts in China and Southeast Asia to explore how governance structures, institutional trust, and local learning processes influence resilience pathways. This interdisciplinary approach merges natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences, with particular emphasis on behavioral dynamics, social networks, and policy design.
The expected impact of STORIES extends beyond academic innovation. By quantifying resilience trajectories and identifying key leverage points for governance and planning, the project generates actionable insights for climate adaptation policies worldwide. Its findings are directly relevant to building more adaptive, equitable, and sustainable flood management systems. Through its integration of social-scientific perspectives with computational and environmental modeling, STORIES demonstrates the indispensable role of social sciences and humanities in understanding and fostering resilience in the face of escalating climate risks.
