Assessing the potential of implementing room for the river in Taiwan to enhance flood resilience

The field of flood risk management has experienced a paradigm shift from control/defence to resilience. In Taiwan, flood risk management highly relies on control/defence infrastructure to constrain floods within levees. Nevertheless, these control/defence dominant strategies have been questioned due to their negative impact on the environment and create a false sense of security for citizens. The Dutch Room for the River project provides the potential to shift away from a conventional approach to a resilient one. However, the policy transfer has no blueprint since the water governance regime and geographic conditions differ from place to place. So, in this article, we took a mixed-method approach to assess the potential of implementing the Room for the River approach in the Tsengwen River Basin in Taiwan. 2D flood simulation was conducted to calculate the effectiveness of dyke relocation intervention. In addition, we interviewed the actors in the water governance regime in Taiwan by using a structured water governance framework. In the end, a flood resilience framework was applied to diagnose the context of Taiwanese flood risk management for transferring Room for the River in Taiwan.