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Flood-wise / Collective flood intelligence

Pilot study with the ‘Policy Mobility for Natural Flood Management’ program

 

Pilot program on ‘Collective Human-Artificial Intelligence’ for Natural Flood Management in India 

This pilot program explores the potential of ‘Foresight-CHAI’ (‘Collective Human-Artificial Intelligence’), for the very topical and challenging issue of natural flood management. 

  • AI now offers powerful new resources and functionalities: it provides foresight-related content, which appears to be very fast and efficient, (along with existential risks);
  • Our focus is then on the CHI or ‘collective human intelligence’ – the social meaning, agenda setting, synergy forming, co-learning, co-creation & co-production into the ‘real world’, all needed for transformational change;
  • the combination of foresight with AI-enabled process, and CHI-focused applications, is explored here as Foresight-CHAI (‘Collective Human-Artificial Intelligence’).

For the human ‘CHI’ side we use an existing process model, the Pathways Toolkit – developed for the goal of enabling ‘collective human intelligence’.  For the AI side we use a menu of leading AI platforms, selected by how far they are relevant and practical for the challenge, and the resources available.

This page contains preliminary results from the pilot program – Natural Flood Management India: this itself is a detailed application within the general program ‘NFM Policy Mobility’ (funded by British Council).

For more see the  Flood-wise NFM – interim report 

 

The NFM challenge:

‘NFM is recognized as a vital strategy for mitigating flood risks and strengthening community resilience’ … But – there are many barriers, social, technological, economic, political etc.  In the face of rapid transitions in climatic conditions, urbanization, industrialization, social / demographic change etc, NFM is often bypassed by large-scale engineering solutions. This calls for an integrated, forward-looking approach – which is the aim of this ‘Foresight NFM’.

Flood-wise / NFM India key question:

‘how can natural flood management build resilience to climate-related disasters, combined with urbanization / industrialization, in the Indian sub-continent over the next 25 years’

This points to many following questions:  how to bring together the many different fields and knowledge types involved in NFM? how to combine these in a way that leads to action? how to look beyond the immediate disaster, for a more strategic transformation of water systems in wider context? 

For the NFM knowledge landscape: Multiple fields and sectors are relevant, each of them inter-connected with others. This concept graphic illustrates the mind-scape (cognitive landscape) with NFM at the centre:

Foresight NFM outline

is a global method & toolkit which inter-connects different forms of knowledge:  explores future opportunities & threats: forms new visions & synergies: applies these to practical pathways & plans. We are now developing an enhanced ‘Foresight-CHAI’ (‘collective human artificial intelligence’), with a leading AI platform, in a UK-China-India collaboration (www.manchester.ac.uk/synergistics/co-futuring/    

This Foresight-NFM workshop program has the following aims:

  • Contribute to the Policy Mobility project, by integration of research-policy knowledge
  • Demonstrate the foresight approach & test the Foresight-CHAI toolkit
  • Enable other free-standing projects to follow on with the NFM transformation

 

Context: NFM Policy Mobility project

This project adopts a Policy Mobility approach to explore localized solutions for community resilience, through Natural Flood Management (NFM), using the Mersey River Basin (MRB) in England and the Shilabati River Basin (SRB) in India as comparative case studies. NFM is recognized as a vital strategy for mitigating flood risks and strengthening community resilience, thereby contributing to global sustainability efforts. To address this, the study adopts a Policy Mobility framework, investigating the transfer and adaptation of NFM strategies from the MRB to the tropical river basin context of the SRB. This two-way knowledge exchange facilitated through a global-to-local perspective, connecting stakeholders from the UK, India, and Japan. Concomitantly, a significant focus is also placed on the role of Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) and gender perspectives in enhancing NFM practices.”

Flood-wise on-site program

This is a contribution to the project ‘Policy Mobility for Local Solutions and Community Resilience through Natural Flood Management’ (British Council funded), part of the international Foresight-CHAI program in Manchester – Kolkata – Beijing.  The program includes

  • Jan 5th lecture on ‘Natural flood management in un-natural times: pathways for the ‘collective NFM intelligence’:
  • Jan 6th introduction to methods & tools:
  • Jan 9th interactive workshop, ‘NFM-Foresight’:  Public lectures follow in Kolkata: 
  • 13th Jan 1130: University of Calcutta: ‘Cities in co-evolution: towards a geography of the collective urban intelligence’: (Calcutta – abstract)
  • 13th Jan 1500: Presidency University: ‘Cities in a new world order: transformative pathways and the collective urban intelligence’: (Presidency – abstract )
  • 14th Jan 1530: Jadavpur University: ‘Towards the ‘PURL’ (peri-urban-rural linkages): adaptive pathways for the ‘collective peri-urban intelligence’.  (Jadavpur – abstract )
  • 21st January 1500: online workshop with the Pathways Toolkit

 

 

The University of Manchester