Sébastien Nobert

Models of best practice in flood risk communication and management

Risk communication plays an increasingly central role in flood risk management, but there is a variety of conflicting advice about what does – and should – get transmitted, why, how, and to whom. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the underlying normative and conceptual models on which those competing assessments of ‘good’ risk communication depend. To that end, the paper identifies four broad models, or approaches, to risk communication: a risk message model of information transfer; a risk instrument model of behavioural change; a risk dialogue model of participatory deliberation; and a risk government model of self-regulation and normalization. These models differ in their theoretical and disciplinary origins and associated philosophical and political commitments, and consequently they define the basic purpose, practice, and future prospects of flood risk communication in quite different ways. Unless these different models of ‘good’ risk communication are acknowledged and understood, efforts to identify best practice for flood risk management are likely to produce inconsistent, if not contradictory, recommendations.

Quality control, validation and user feedback of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS)

The quality control, validation and verification of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) are described. EFAS is designed as a flood early warning system at pan-European scale, to complement national systems and provide flood warnings more than 2 days before a flood. On average 20–30 alerts per year are sent out to the EFAS partner network which consists of 24 National hydrological authorities responsible for transnational river basins. Quality control of the system includes the evaluation of the hits, misses and false alarms, showing that EFAS has more than 50% of the time hits. Furthermore, the skills of both the meteorological as well as the hydrological forecasts are evaluated, and are included here for a 10-year period. Next, end-user needs and feedback are systematically analysed. Suggested improvements, such as real-time river discharge updating, are currently implemented.

Responding to Early Flood Warnings in the European Union

The first warning of the severe flooding that would afflict Romania, Moldova and the Ukraine in the summer of 2008 was issued by the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) on 20 July 2008.1 With soil moisture levels already high from an unusually wet summer and heavy rainfall forecast for the week ahead, this experimental, pan-European early-warning system was predicting a significant probability of river flows exceeding the ‘severe’, or very highest, EFAS alert level on all the major river basins in Romania from 25 July onwards. Seeing a strong flooding signal persist over consecutive forecast simulations, the scientific team working on the pre-operational development of EFAS at the European Commission’s (EC) Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy felt confident enough to issue a formal alert to the Romanian National Institute of Hydrology and Water Management (INHGA). INHGA is the national body with operational responsibility for flood forecasting and warning in Romania, and in 2006 it signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding so as to receive medium-term (3–10 days) EFAS alerts to complement the weather forecasts, real-time river monitoring systems and short-term (0-48 hours), largely statistical, flood-forecast models it uses to provide flood forecasts to the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations in the Interior Ministry and the national water authority, Apele Romane, who in turn is responsible for issuing catchment-scale forecasts and warnings to local civil protection authorities (CPAs) and the public at large in Romania.

Resilience for the Anthropocene? Shedding light on the forgotten temporalities shaping post-crisis management in the French Sud Ouest

Abstract Building on a set of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observations conducted in the south-west region of France in the aftermath of two windstorms (‘Martin’ in 1999 and ‘Klaus’ in 2009) and the collapse of the natural gas industry, this paper explores how different temporal dynamics and rhythms interact in the shaping of post-crisis responses in the wider context of the Anthropocene. By so doing, it argues that resilience proponents and critics have articulated a wider biopolitics of speed in which accelerated futures and explicated time have both become the focal temporal realms in which it is possible to (re)think and enact political change. Finally, it is argued that resilience is detracting our attention from important enquiries about temporal relations and processes such as rhythms, which have the capacity to transcend classical rationality and axiology for reimagining what it means to be together, in a different human–non-human nexus that is fit for the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene and the Challenge of Implicated Time

Along with astrophysicists, geologists have been crucial in connecting us to the story of our planet, participating in writing the grand narratives that are cementing an ontological security that is capable of situating ourselves, and the entire world, in the flux of infinity. This grand narrative is inscribed in stratigraphy, which has recorded the traces of long-gone biochemical and anthropogenic activities trapped in geological depositions, defining in the same time the events that could become known globally as stratigraphic markers in the shape of sediments, rocks or glaciers (Lewis and Maslin, 2015). This knowledge has served to create the category of the past, which in turn has given shape to geological time frames such as the Holocene, but more importantly perhaps, it has recast anthropogenic events such as the Grand Acceleration and the collision of Europe with the Americas as foundational events of a new epoch in which humans have become the main factors of environmental change: welcome to the Anthropocene. Outside the impermeable bubble of earth system sciences and geology, anyone who has paid attention to environmental news in the last decades has probably realised that the world seems to be plagued with climate-related hazards and disasters such as droughts, floods, heath waves and wild fires, along with witnessing Science as Culture, 2018 Vol. 27, No. 1, 138–143, https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2017.1339682

Nationalism, (Dis)simulation, and the Politics of Science in Québec's Forest Crisis

This article explores the controversy over the management of the boreal forest of Québec in Canada. Most academic attention describing forest conflicts in North America has focused on the polarity between environmental nongovernmental organizations and First Nations on the one hand and the forest industry lobby and scientific forestry on the other, but little has been said about the role played by nationalism in orchestrating the overexploitation of the forest. By investigating the underlying effects of Québecs nationalism, this article illustrates how the institutional realignment following the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s positioned simulation science at the center of a negotiation process allowing the realization of both nationalist economic agenda and industrial interests to materialize, a relationship between nationalism and science that made Québecs forest crisis a distinct event in North America. Whereas political ecology has asserted the significance of exploring scientific discourses and practices in the production of cultural politics of nature, this article draws on science and technology studies to demonstrate that the so-called complexity, rationality, and certainty associated with forestry science function to disguise the deeply political nature of the production and use of scientific knowledge. With its focus on the development and usage of simulation modeling in forestry, this article concludes that what is at stake in using science in the management of Québecs boreal forest is not merely related either to the forest industry or to expansion of powers of government but, rather, to its weakness in gaining the public and the industrys trust in the management of the publics forests.