A conceptual framework for quantitatively understanding the impacts of floods/droughts and their management on the...

Throughout history, factors closely associated with the development of human riparian civilization have undoubtedly included extreme hydrological events (floods and droughts). Few studies have been found on evaluating floods/droughts management from a perspective of long-term resilience of socio-ecological system perspective. In addition, there are increasing studies on conceptual frameworks on the resilience of social-ecological systems. However, resilience to what and how to measure it is still unclear and a continuing research topic. This paper aims to understand the impacts of floods/droughts and their management on the catchment socio-ecological system (C-SES) by developing a measurable resilience framework in which floods/droughts and their management are considered part of whole-of-system external drivers. It will be built on the theoretical development of SESs and inter-disciplinary hydrology and borrow the theory of elastic mechanics to consider the catchment as a socio-ecological system (C-SES) and analyze the floods/droughts and their management as external stress on C-SES. The framework includes five logically connected components; (1) defining a catchment as a resilient catchment social and ecological system(C-SES); (2) defining social-institutional and natural forces on the C-SES; (3) defining flood/drought disasters forces on the C-SES; (4) defining flood/drought management forces on the C-SES; and (5) defining and calculating the resilience of a C-SES to the forces defined in (2), (3) and (4), and analyzing the change in different categories of resilience with time.