The March of this year saw the publication by The International Water Association of a book of Zoran Vojinovic and Michael B. Abbott CEng FICE entitled Flood Risk and Social Justice.
The book opens by indicating the very different view that this book presents on the treatment of flood risk as compared with almost all of its precedents. It provides a new response to a situation in which our world is being increasingly overwhelmed by increasingly disastrous flooding events, all of which are associated with devastating losses and suffering, as these are now occurring almost daily. Although commonly referred to as natural disasters, these are rarely in fact the results of nature-related processes alone.
They are to an ever increasing extent directly attributable to the actions of human beings: they are the results of human thinking and decision-making, which are in turn based on certain misplaced understandings, attitudes, needs and values. Thus the roots of many, and indeed most, of our problems nowadays reside in the human mind as much as anywhere else.
This book argues that what is needed in the here and now is a far-reaching move beyond the current materialistic and technocratic mindsets and so to add other, social, dimensions to flood risk mitigation practices that provide us with the means to attain to states of social justice. An approach through the creation of hydroinformatic environments that have the capacity to mobilise and catalyse qualitative changes in the attitudes of the stakeholders by mobilising their creative imaginations, primarily through highly realistic graphical presentations, follows upon an article by the second author that received the 2008 Telford Gold Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Michael B. Abbott CEng FICE, ICE Member in Belgium