A Social Network Analysis based Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Assessment of Flood Risk Management Alternatives

Flood is a natural disaster that once occur, could cause serious financial damage and widespread human losses. Conventional approaches to flood risk management are mostly resistance-based. However, a resilience-based approach, taking into account uncertainties and can play a very effective role in the resilience of human settlements against this critical risk. It is essential to combine these two approaches to manage flood uncertainty through decision-making frameworks, and to use multi-criteria decision tools that can consider perspectives, goals, practical options, and stakeholder evaluation criteria. Accordingly, in focused group discussions, a hybrid set of flood crisis management alternatives were extracted and divided into three stages; pre-crisis, crisis response and post-crisis. The weights of these options were then calculated using a combination of social network analysis approach and multi-criteria decision making, and top three alternatives of each category were presented and examined. The results showed that the resilience-based approach in flood risk management has been considered by experts in cases that indicate the movement of experts from relying solely on a resistance-based approach to an adaptive approach to consider uncertainties, especially the effects of climate change.