A prevention versus cure dilemma: Protection from post-wildfire flood hazards combining experiences from Greece and Australia

This paper contributes to addressing the escalating challenge of post-wildfire flood hazards - a growing threat to people and nature under climate change - by integrating advanced flood modelling within a governance framework to support proactive flood-protection planning. The coastal community of Kineta, in Greece, is used as a case study to demonstrate the combined application of the multi-disciplinary modelling approach and the governance assessment framework. The modelling approach analyses post-wildfire floods, and guides the design of post-wildfire erosion and flood protection treatments (PEFTs). It combines remote sensing analyses, atmospheric and hydraulic simulation models like WRF-ARW and HEC-RAS, and the geospatial application of targeted PEFTs, such as log-erosion barriers and wooden check dams. The need to bring such model-driven insights into policies implementing PEFTs, led us to augment the modelling approach with a governance framework followed in Australia, which has many similar hazard and governance characteristics to those of Greece. The governance framework is based on the values-rules-knowledge (VRK) model of decision-making contexts, and identifies key barriers that lead to insufficient flood protection. Robust insights are generated from this process about how to effectively apply integrated modelling approaches within decision-making contexts for knowledge and policy co-production to address institutional, behavioral and knowledge barriers impeding timely investments in flood risk mitigation. The proposed framework is suggested as a comprehensive science-to-policy approach that can support more proactive post-wildfire flood risk management.