A new approach of Robustness-Resistance-Recovery (3Rs) to assessing flood resilience: A case study in Dongting Lake Basin

• A process-based flood resilience assessment framework is proposed. • The synergy of robustness and resistance dominated flood resilience. • Resilience combination zoning bridges the resilience assessment and flood management. The frequency of natural disasters and the losses caused by global climate change and urbanization continue to increase. Traditional rigid defense methods cannot meet the needs of modern disaster mitigation and should shift to resilience approaches. However, most existing resilience studies stopped at qualitative analysis and static evaluation. Quantitative evaluation of dynamic resilience is quite rare. In this study, focusing on flood resilience, we applied the process-based “Robustness-Resistance-Recovery (3Rs)” quantitative assessment framework, and used the Dongting Lake Basin as an empirical area. The results showed that the resilience of the whole Dongting Lake Basin was high, but the Dongting Lake Eco-economic Zone had poor flood resilience. The low value of robustness was concentrated in the north and central part of Hunan Province, affected by the distribution of water systems. The resistance was relatively low and the administrative units with the top two low levels accounted for 61.99%, while the recovery level was high with obvious good performance in the west. In addition, the synergy of robustness and resistance dominated the flood resilience. This study proposed a resilience assessment framework based on the “3Rs” and provided a new process perspective for improving the flood resilience.