Natural Flood Management as an Adaptive Pathway to Climate-Resilient Communities

Dear Colleagues,

Nature-based solutions to managing flooding have become an increasingly attractive approach towards creating climate-resilient communities and places. These solutions, which encompass natural flood management (NFM) interventions, attempt to work with natural hydrological processes to retain and slow water within the upper river catchment, while creating wider benefits such as habitat creation and sediment capture. These approaches work well as a catchment-based approach and incorporate woodland planting, agricultural practices, storage ponds, sustainable urban drainage systems and coastal managed realignment. NFM often involves lower costs when compared to structural and engineered approaches, whilst delivering wider ecosystem benefits. Despite these additional benefits, there has been relatively limited uptake of these approaches due to a variety of barriers, including a lack of scientific evidence, concerns with maintenance and monitoring, and a lack of appreciation of the costs and benefits involved. The need to work in partnership with various stakeholders including local authorities, government agencies, landowners and businesses has also created challenges. This Special Issue seeks to consider how NFM can support the development of more climate-resilient communities through creating adaptive pathways that help to better plan for future flooding. This calls for contributions from different disciplines together with multi and interdisciplinary research towards offering new insights and innovative solutions. The Special Issue welcomes contributions from international experts and case studies towards mainstreaming these approaches and providing important learning opportunities.

Prof. Dr. David Proverbs
Prof. Dr. Bingunath Ingirige
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.