Systems Analysis in Flood Risk Management

(00:00) S. Tabibian: Welcome to The Climate Map podcast. The Climate Map, an initiative founded by Covalence Global, outlines the complexities of climate change on a streamlined, action-oriented mind map. This podcast is an archive for our research, highlighting conversations with entrepreneurs, scientists, policymakers, and designers. 

(00:18) S. Tabibian: Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself? Where are you from, and how did you develop an interest in systems analysis for water and environmental issues? 

(00:27) Dr. Simonovic: I am a naturalized Canadian, originally from a place that was called Yugoslavia, now divided into, unfortunately, five different countries. I got my civil engineering bachelor's degree at University of Belgrade. I got my master's degree from the same university. And after that, I continued my education in the United States, where I got my PhD degree at University of California in Davis. 

(00:59) Dr. Simonovic: My interest in systems analysis was somehow following the development of technology. I was a graduate student in the early 70s. And that was the period where, for the first time, the kind of computer technology start entering different areas of science. And I was obviously following, being interested in these new developments. In my master's degree, I searched for a way of kind of bringing together my expertise in water resources management, which was coming from the civil engineering, with this new technology, basically computer-based technologies. And I discovered that the only way to do that is actually to start studying systems and systems theory. That was not possible to actually do in Belgrade easily. So I ended up actually getting my master's degree and advisorship from. two different departments. Civil engineering, which was providing my education in the area of water resources management, and electrical engineering, which was the place where I was able to study the elements of the systems theory and application of systems theory to different engineering systems. 

(02:17) Dr. Simonovic: Then moving to the United States, it was relatively easy to follow that particular part, basically merge the systems approach to engineering background and continue kind of working in this area. Around that time, in the early 70s, the computers were seriously entering into the water resources management in United States. A very known Harvard University program was introduced where different mathematical tools and techniques which required higher computational power were slowly being adapted to deal with the problems of modeling hydrological processes, determining how to operate the infrastructure like reservoirs and so on, finding the optimal ways of sharing the, you know, water resources between multiple users and, you know, questions like that. And that was basically really cementing my kind of continuation of work in this area, you know, my PhD, my master's degree, they all were kind of directed in the same way to the application of different optimization techniques to complex water resources problems. 

(03:30) S. Tabibian: Discussing the different methods of systems analysis, what factors increase the complexity of water resource management, and how do you manage and account for those factors? 

(03:42) Dr. Simonovic: This is a good question. And I think this question is actually very valid, not only for the beginning of my professional career, but also for the current moment, you know, where we are, in my opinion, the things around us are seriously changing and in a very dynamic way. I call that global changing factors, but three elements of this kind of global changing factors that are driving everything are changes in population, especially population growth and distribution around the planet. And nowadays, the migrations of the population, very large movements of the people from one region to another region, either due to the economic differences or in search for better life or escaping, you know, wars and atrocities that may be affecting them. 

(04:33) Dr. Simonovic: The second aspect of this global change is changing the land use and a very significant element of that is urbanization, very rapid, fast urbanization and very large portion of the world population, basically moving to the cities that are growing, you know, very fast and search for jobs, for better opportunities, and so on. 

(04:59) Dr. Simonovic: And the third element of this global change is change in climatic conditions. We are facing this global warming that I think is being recorded documented last year was the warmest of 175 years of records. The last 10 warmest years are all in the last 10 years. So we are definitely observing change that is affecting water resources in a significant way. 

(05:28) Dr. Simonovic: Now, how to put these things together, how to address these concerns, you know, which are coming from the kind of social aspects of the population movements and growth to economic aspects of, you know, land use and urbanization to, you know, natural science aspects of the changes in climatic system, requires sophisticated tools. The consequence of this global change is basically there are two consequences. One is very major increase in the complexity of the problems that we are dealing with. And the second one is significantly increase in the uncertainty of the problems that we are dealing with. 

(06:08) Dr. Simonovic: So to do and deal with the complexity, I think the only approach available today that has been part of my professional expertise is the use of systems approach, where you look at the problem as a complex interaction of multiple elements that are dynamically producing the change in the system behavior over time. 

(06:30) S. Tabibian: I know that systems thinking is an emerging field, at least among my generation. Just a couple of weeks ago, I did a fellowship on sustainability that was all about systems thinking. So I'm really interested to hear how does systems thinking transfer into the flood management process and how is it sort of different or similar to the water resource management systems thinking? 

(06:56) Dr. Simonovic: Flood risk management is only one area of the water resources management. This area is dealing with the protection from very high waters. In the process of applying the systems approach to various complex problems, I also ended up participating in different activities related to flood risk management. 

(07:16) Dr. Simonovic: There was also a very important point happening in my life in end of 90s. At that time, I was a professor of civil image engineering at University of Manitoba, a place different from where I'm right now. It's in central Canada. In 1997, this region experienced so-called the flood of the century. There is a red river that flows from United States, North Dakota, Minnesota, into Canada, into the province of Manitoba, and the city where I was living at that time was one of the largest exposed and vulnerable place for that flood. The river is very interesting. It goes from south to north and the area is extremely flat, agriculture area. The watershed is extremely large, 160 ,000 square kilometers. When the snow started melting in the southern part of the basin, the northern parts and Canadian parts were still under ice and snow and that naturally creates conditions for flooding. 

(08:27) Dr. Simonovic: I lived through that particular flood of 1997, the flood of the century. Immediately after the flood, I was one of the five Canadian experts appointed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, basically the federal government, to work with the five colleagues from the United States who were appointed by the U .S. government and informed the so-called International Joint Commission that was responsible for management of water resources, the boundary between  Canada and United States. So that work gave me a very interesting, provided me with a very interesting exposure and very interesting experience.

(09:12) Dr. Simonovic: We were supposed to talk to people in both countries and we did meet lots of people immediately after the flood. Then later, during the process of preparing the reports and recommendations for the governments, we went through the region a number of times. And I think I experienced, for the first time, a very significant impact of what we are doing. To me, as a professor, to teach students how to design a dike or how to manage the reservoir, how to find out the flow in the river, it's easy. But to respond to a person who lost everything in the flood is extremely difficult. And that experience really affected and changed my professional view, where I even more realized that looking at these problems from all these different aspects, what I think systems approach allows us is very, very important and needs to continue being implemented. 

(10:26) Dr. Simonovic: The way how we are implementing this in the area of flood management is relatively straightforward. The flooding includes a number of processes from precipitation, transformation of precipitation into runoff and then the runoff being carried through the channel and water moving the way. In the case of flooding, we have a very kind of have issues affecting different aspects of this process, either intensive rainfall or very high flows which are exceeding the capacity of the channel to, you know, different ways of the timing of the peak flows versus the duration, basically, of life.  So the systems approach can be really well applied in kind of dealing with the elements of the process. 

(11:21) Dr. Simonovic: So the experience I mentioned in the Red River gave me also opportunity to work and develop the research and apply the research to kind of solving different flood management problems using the systems approach. With my collaborators, I developed an effective system for managing evacuation of people. Also, we developed very sophisticated hydraulic models. Because it's a very flat area, you cannot easily find the direction where the water is moving once when it leaves the banks of the river. The water moves in every possible direction and only detailed how digital elevation models which are providing you with a topography and the three dimensional hydraulic models are able to kind of find out the direction and help those who are managing floods to minimize the damage or provide the protection for the people and property. So that's one of the ways, there are a lot of details I can go in, but that's who I think one of the significant ways where the systems approach is helping flood risk management. 

(12:38) S. Tabibian: That's so impressive that the Canadian government pointed you to solve this huge challenge. And I was also wondering in your works you were discussing how floods were among the most frequent and deadly natural disasters. However, I've read various papers saying that the philanthropic eye and the public eye is generally more attracted to hard hit, short term, high impact disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis. Have you ever encountered a lack of understanding for the impacts of flooding? And if so, how can we change this perception? 

(13:16) Dr. Simonovic: When you talk to people, to people who were affected, the flood, the newest properties, for example, then you realize that explaining what we know and how the water will reach their place and what needs to be done, it's becoming very much interpreted by their own perceptions, by their own kind of values. I was able to realize that someone who experienced flooding in the past was reacting in a completely different way from someone who was experiencing the flood for the first time. The people who were better informed with the forecast and also provided initial help and funding to fight the flooding were having a very different perception from those who didn't have that. So the conditions and I think all the factors that are affecting the flood and the consequences of the flooding were really interpreted in a very different ways based on our experience, based on our current situation, and based obviously on the knowledge and assistance being provided. I somehow tried in the continuation of my work to bring these perceptions into the pitch first by using the systems approach. And then by bringing into systems models of, let's say, river basin, some of the social issues, perceptions, values, and so on. 

(14:59) Dr. Simonovic: So one of the messages that I was conveying through my publications, books, and also participation in different meeting and conferences was to look at the water resources problems, and especially I think in the area of flood management as a social problem, the problem that includes kind of individuals, organizations, and societies, and embedded in the environment, where these subsystems are interconnected by flows of information, resources. When you bring, and when you look at the problem as a social problem, the value systems automatically become very important, because what you consider dangerous, what I consider dangerous is very different. How I interpret the information about coming flood from you may be very different. And that's what I think this kind of emphasis that the water resources problems are, social problems, very much important. 

(16:09) Dr. Simonovic: If you would like stories, I have many of them. One is interested to this discussion. I was invited to Sweden to very large meeting, and I decided to present this concept of looking at the water resources as a social system.  And during my presentation, not even hearing the end, one of the colleagues in the audience stood up and said, you don't know what you are talking about, and left the room. That indicates what I am trying to say, the different perceptions and different understanding, so the systems may put us in a very different position and create different stands towards selecting the method for the solution, accepting what the decisions are and deciding how to proceed in solving these complex issues, problems, and situations. 

(17:09) S. Tabibian: That's a really good point about the social aspect of all of this solution building. That sort of leads to another question I had about systems analysis, which is how is it affected by the geographical region you're focusing on? If you're particularly focused on a specific developing country, for example, how do you make sure that your proposed solutions are accounting for those social aspects? 

(17:34) Dr. Simonovic: Every situation requires this kind of input and understanding of the local conditions. This is very important. Not only local conditions in a physical sense, you know, what's the slope? What is the precipitation average? What is the, you know, river flow or the elevation of the land, but also understanding the situation, you know, from the kind of social point of view, who lives there? How these people live? You know, what do they know about the race and how they react to the situations, hazardous situations like flooding or something like that? And also, you know, in what kind of relationship are these people to governments, potential help assistance of the professionals and, you know, funding to deal and fight these situations that may create the difficulties and problems. 

(18:34) Dr. Simonovic: A systems approach is a very general in nature. It actually tells you that you have a complex problem, helps you to find out what are the key elements of the problem, but challenges you to identify how one element affects another element. We call that, you know, causal relationships. Like if it's a very heavy precipitation, there is a definite chance that the flow will increase in the river. The systems approach then gives you understanding how these causal relationships are relating that system structure to the system behavior. If the links between elements are pushing systems to some kind of stable solution, we call them, you know, negative feedbacks. If this, you know, elements of the system and causal relationships are pushing and destabilizing the system, we call them positive feedbacks. 

(19:40) Dr. Simonovic: Understanding the feedbacks and the number of these kind of interactions between them helps us understand how the overall system behaves. And that's where I think local conditions, elements that are forming the system structure, will be very important and very much specific for each region, for each location, for each event situation in time. 

(20:31) S. Tabibian: Absolutely, what's your vision for the future of systems analysis, specifically in relation to water and environmental systems? 

(20:21) Dr. Simonovic: I'm permanently talking about that and trying to say that actually systems approach is nowadays more and more important than it was in the past when it was reintroduced.  The level of complexity of the problems that we were solving in 1970s and the problems we are solving right now. is much, much, much higher because all these closing factors that I mentioned, you know, population, land use, climate, and so on, are being more and more influential in affecting the population, in affecting different regions, or kind of require, I think, require different way of looking at them. 

(21:08) Dr. Simonovic: You know, formally, I would say that the systems approach is being implemented. Sometimes people are not even aware that they're using the systems approach when they look at the problem and solve the problem.  But I think a little bit more and stronger formal education introduction of the systems approach to various disciplines that may be, you know, that may be of importance for the particular problem domain is needed. 

(21:36) Dr. Simonovic: It will be very nice. I had the opportunities to work on the, you know, interdisciplinary projects with the social scientists, economists, geographers, engineers, and so on. And I can tell you that, like, from the three year project, we were spending, we were spending about a year and a half to understand each other, to understand the language, to understand the meaning of, you know, the language we are using. And I think that's where the systems approach can fit extremely well and help in almost every possible situation. 

(22:11) S. Tabibian: I really like that point, how systems approach can also build a common language between various experts. So you've shared so many amazing insights. Is there anything else you'd like to share? 

(22:23) Dr. Simonovic: You know, I'm happy to have the opportunity to talk to you and hope that some of these messages may be of use to some young people. I feel that this is one of the things that we need to do a little bit more actively and that's to kind of engage the younger people, future generations into these kind of processes. We are trying to separate ourselves by expertise and saying how much we know and not maintain that dialogue. But bringing the people what you're doing, I think it's a good idea. I'm not completely sure who is your audience and how successful you are. But that's the way to do it, is to kind of engage people into dialogue, try to engage different levels of expertise, try to engage different disciplines, try to engage, you know, general population, and those who are making decisions into dialogue that will lead to, you know, better solution and better life for everyone of us. 

(23:24) S. Tabibian: Awesome. Well, that was a great way to close the episode. Thank you so much for your time. And I look forward to sharing all of your insights with our audience. 

(23:34) Dr. Simonovic: Thank you, Sophia. Thank you. I'm looking forward to that. 

(23:38) S. Tabibian: And that is it for The Climate Map today. Please visit covalenceglobal.org to learn more about how you can take action with us.