A Framework for Watershed Flood Resilience in the Context of Climate Change: Concept, Assessment, and Application

Abstract

Extreme flooding events are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change, challenging the effectiveness of traditional, infrastructure-centric flood management strategies. A key gap remains in the lack of spatially explicit and process-based frameworks for assessing and enhancing flood resilience at the watershed scale, which hinders the development of integrated and adaptive management solutions. This study proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating watershed flood resilience (WFR) by integrating resilience theory with the “source-flow-sink” paradigm from landscape ecology. It applies it to the post-disaster reconstruction of the Sishui River Basin following the 2021 Zhengzhou flood in China. The framework quantifies WFR through pre-event resistance capacity and intra-event adaptive capacity using hydrological modeling and loss curves. It systematically analyzes the effects of targeted interventions across source, flow, and sink areas. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves WFR in the Sishui River Basin, with source interventions generally outperforming flow and sink interventions in the simulated cases, and compensatory effects observed among different intervention types. The findings confirm the operational feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework, including nature-based solutions and spatial planning in watershed management, which could provide support for future holistic and adaptive flood resilience strategies addressing climate change.

Keywords

Watershed flood resilience / Flood risk management / Resilience assessment / Nature-based solutions (NbSs) / Sponge city / Zhengzhou

Acknowledgments

We especially thank Kongjian Yu from Peking university for the insightful conceptual guidance he provided for this study.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, X.P.; Methodology, X.P.; Software, S.W. (Shipeng Wen); Data Curation, X.P., S.W. (Shipeng Wen), Y.H. and S.W. (Songtao Wu); Writing—Original Draft Preparation, X.P.; Writing—Review & Editing, X.P. and S.W. (Songtao Wu); Visualization, X.P. and S.W. (Shipeng Wen); Supervision, X.P.

Ethics Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Data will be made available on request. The data are not publicly available due to privacy.

Funding

This study was financially supported by the Heilongjiang Provincial Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. LBH-Z23164) and the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (Grant No. LH2024E051).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Footnotes

1.State space refers to a mathematical or graphical representation of all possible states of a system in systems theory, defined by key variables (such as resistance and adaptation capacities in flood resilience). In this study, the state space is used to visualize and assess the combined effects of different interventions on watershed flood resilience.

2.Iso-resilience curve is a conceptual line or contour in a state space diagram along which the overall resilience of a system remains constant, despite changes in its underlying components (such as resistance and adaptation capacities). In the context of watershed flood resilience, points lying on the same iso-resilience curve represent different combinations of system properties that yield the same level of resilience, which helps to visualize trade-offs and optimization paths for resilience improvement.

3.“Source-flow-sink” is a conceptual framework derived from landscape ecology, representing the spatial process of material or energy movement from the starting to the ending. Taking the water movement in a watershed as an example, “source” refers to areas where runoff is generated (e.g., headwaters, hillslopes), “flow” denotes the pathways and channels through which water is conveyed, and “sink” indicates zones where water is stored, absorbed, or utilized (e.g., floodplains, wetlands, and urban areas). This framework helps to systematically analyze and manage flood processes across the entire watershed.

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