A conceptual framework for quantitatively understanding the impacts of floods/droughts and their management on the catchment's social-ecological system (C-SES).

Throughout history, factors closely associated with the development of human riparian civilization have undoubtedly included extreme hydrological events (floods and droughts). Few studies have been found on evaluating floods/droughts management from a perspective of long-term resilience of socio-ecological system perspective. In addition, there are increasing studies on conceptual frameworks on the resilience of social-ecological systems. However, resilience to what and how to measure it is still unclear and a continuing research topic. This paper aims to understand the impacts of floods/droughts and their management on the catchment socio-ecological system (C-SES) by developing a measurable resilience framework in which floods/droughts and their management are considered part of whole-of-system external drivers. It will be built on the theoretical development of SESs and inter-disciplinary hydrology and borrow the theory of elastic mechanics to consider the catchment as a socio-ecological system (C-SES) and analyze the floods/droughts and their management as external stress on C-SES. The framework includes five logically connected components; (1) defining a catchment as a resilient catchment social and ecological system(C-SES); (2) defining social-institutional and natural forces on the C-SES; (3) defining flood/drought disasters forces on the C-SES; (4) defining flood/drought management forces on the C-SES; and (5) defining and calculating the resilience of a C-SES to the forces defined in (2), (3) and (4), and analyzing the change in different categories of resilience with time.