Sustainable flood memories
Sustainable flood memory emphasises the importance of remembering and learning from past flood events to enhance community resilience and adaptive strategies.
Reviewing flood memory documents. Image credit: Sustainable Flood Memory project.
Sustainable flood memories and the development of community resilience to future flood risk
Lindsey McEwen 1, Joanne Garde-Hansen2, Owain Jones3, Andrew Holmes1 and Franz Krause4
1 Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience, College of Arts, Technology and Environment, University of West England Bristol, United Kingdom
2 School of Media and Communication, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
3 School of Humanities, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom
4 Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany
Funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council from 2011 to 2015, the Sustainable Flood Memories (SFM) project created a conceptual framework to enhance community resilience against flooding. SFM empowers communities to navigate flood risk management through local knowledge and collective memory. The lessons learned from the SFM project provided insights for building a more resilient future by engaging communities, preserving local knowledge, and fostering adaptive learning.
SFM acknowledges the importance of individual and community experiences with flooding.
Lindsey McEwen and others (2016) described how sustainable flood memories can come from many sources including (page 17):
narratives, oral and archived histories, physical marks, artefacts and material practices in the landscape, and media representing floods, comprising folk memories, autobiographical accounts, personal stories and anecdotes of previous floods (routine–severe) and their impacts.
The project had 2 components. The first was a comparative study of 3 communities that experienced flooding involving local council members, flood action group representatives, and emergency services. The project culminated in a conceptual framework for SFM emphasising the role of local knowledge and experiences in decision-making processes.
The second component used digital storytelling as a tool for adaptive learning. In partnership with the Environment Agency and local government, 21 digital stories were co-created with community members to address various aspects of community flood preparedness. These narratives preserved individual and collective memories and served as educational resources for at-risk communities.
Digital flood story: A community
Impact
The project helped to improve community resilience, archive local flood knowledge, engage various sectors and support training.
The project increased community awareness and engagement by fostering a collective memory of past floods and as a result, communities became more aware of their vulnerabilities. This increased community awareness helped to encourage local participation in flood management discussions, promoting ownership and responsibility for flood preparedness. It enhanced resilience given that communities learned from past flood events and could develop better preparedness strategies. This was particularly crucial for regions where extreme weather events may not be within living memory, necessitating a balance between remembering and forgetting.
Former CEO National Flood Forum (2025) said:
Detailed knowledge about very local flood risk and flooding incidents is incredibly important, both when combining it with the skills needed to better manage flood risk and in supporting communities to build their resilience. But all too often it gets lost from one generation to another and as people move away.
Communities were also able to protect their local flood knowledge by archiving community-generated flood knowledge. This was important to ensure that informal histories were preserved alongside formal documentation.
Property Flood Resilience Champion, Flood Mary (2025) said:
Local flood memory is an essential part of the journey to flood resilience. Having local knowledge of flood risk is so important. I remember someone knocking [at] my door to find out if I knew about the local flood history, as they were about to buy a house in my street. Having somewhere to point people to, which has both new and historical flood risk information keeps flood risk real. Pulling all partners together to share their knowledge and expertise is an excellent way to make this happen.
In addition, policymakers could leverage historical flood data and community narratives to create tailored flood risk management policies. The data could also improve infrastructure planning, ensuring that new developments are resilient to potential future flooding scenarios. They can also support training. The digital stories co-created during the project have been used in training for Environment Agency community officers and shared amongst at-risk community groups, demonstrating their practical application.
The SFM project sparked discussions across various sectors, bringing in new voices and perspectives, particularly from the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector. Projects like Gloucestershire Archives’ Green Pledge Project have adopted SFM methodologies to enhance community engagement.
Learning & Outreach Officer, Green Pledge Project, Gloucestershire Heritage Hub (2025) said:
The Green Pledge Project at Gloucestershire Archives is about connecting people with archival material relating to our environmental history. We are using the records to inform and inspire people to live more sustainably. The creation of material, such as those made for the SFM project, which are stored at Gloucestershire Archives, enable us to do that in a very direct way. They have been shared in project presentations and event, sparking discussions around past floods and community resilience for future ones.
Resources
Centre for Floods, Communities and Resilience (CFCR). Sustainable Flood Memories and Community Resilience. Available at: https://esrcfloodmemories.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: 25 March 2025).
Garde-Hansen, J., McEwen, L. J., Holmes, A. and Jones, O. (2017). Sustainable Flood Memory: Remembering as Resilience. Memory Studies 10(4), 384–405. Available at: doi.org/10.1177/1750698016667453 (Accessed: 25 March 2025).
Garde-Hansen J., McEwen L. J. and Jones O. (2016). Towards a memo-techno-ecology: mediating memories of extreme flooding in resilient communities. In Hajek, A. Lohmeier, L. and Pentzold, C. (eds.) Social Memory in a Mediated World: Remembering in troubled times, Palgrave Macmillan. Pp 55-73.
Holmes, A. and McEwen L. J. (2020). How to exchange stories of local flood resilience from flood rich areas to the flooded areas of the future. Environmental Communication 14(5), 597-613. Available at: doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2019.1697325 (Accessed: 25 March 2025).
McEwen, L. J., Garde-Hansen, J., Holmes, A., Jones, O. and Krause, F. (2016). Sustainable Flood Memories, Lay knowledges and the Development of Community Resilience to Future Flood Risk. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42 (1), 14-28. Available at: doi.org/10.1111/tran.12149 (Accessed: 25 March 2025).
McEwen, L. J. and Holmes, A. (2017). Sustainable Flood Memories: Developing the concept, process and practice in flood risk. In Vinet, F (ed.) Floods Vol 2: Risk Management. Editions ISTE (published in English and French) Chapter 10, 141-153.
McEwen L. J., Garde-Hansen, J, Robertson, I and Holmes, A. (2018). Exploring the changing nature of flood archives: community capital for flood resilience. In Metzger, A and Linton, J (eds.) La Crue, l’inondation: un patrimoine. L’Harmattan Publishing House, France.
United Nations Office for Disaster and Risk Reduction (UNDRR). PreventionWeb: Floods, Memories, and Resilience. Available at: https://www.preventionweb.net/news/floods-memories-and-resilience (Accessed: 25 March 2025).
Funder
- UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Collaborators
- Environment Agency
- Local government
- UWE Bristol
- Civil society organisations
Research period
- 2011 to 2015
Impact period
- Ongoing
Impact country
- UK
- France
Contributing to the areas of research interest
- 2 - Resilience and adaptation to flooding and coastal change