Transboundary systems provision for sustainable and resilient climate risk-, disaster risk- and crisis management in the flood disaster-damaged Ahr Valley in Germany - Implementing Spree Forest and Lusatia Regions Land and Environmental Systems Model

Successful operationalisations for sustainable and resilient climate risk- (CRM), disaster risk- (DRM) and crisis management (CM) in general is not easy for affected disaster-damaged regions. In case, different regions are concurrently impacted, co-benefiting communication, assessment, planning and management, decision-making as well as benchmarking in kinds of well working solutions for similar needs or risks in each region are not effortless. If regions are not lying within same administrative coordination responsibility, the more complex coordination is getting. The chance for well adjusted planning, data and communication channels within a Transboundary Systems Provision (TSP) must be critically evaluated in case of aiming to strengthen sustainability and resilience. Especially in case of a combined, region-overarching (benchmarking) perspective and planning for a sustainable CRM, DRM and CM, the to be implemented topics of sustainability, land- and environmental systems thinking, and transformative science for enhancing an optimized land resilience are aggravating a fluent, transparent and on the ground processing way.
Catalyst of this research was the flood disaster in mid-July 2021 and simultaneously threatening COVID-19 pandemics in Ahr valley in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, surrounding regions in Germany, and in Belgium. Topical entrance into this case study was a (short-termed) initiative field and action research about sustainable development, resilience and general planning combined land- and environmental systems processing, leading to constructive solution transferors against devastating natural hazards for CRM, DRM and post-catastrophic CM.
A by the author for Lusatia, implied Spree Forest Region, possibly for worldwide regions developed, applied innovative theoretical approach, and verbal-argumentative model was approved for operationalizing into the flood-destroyed Ahr Valley Region. Spatially determining different sustainable and resilient aspects through the regional planning level, landscape scale with the planning instrument of landscape units, and by the help of the operationally implanting „Climate Adaptive Land Use within Landscape Units and Drought and Water Management” (CA(LU)²WA) proactive landscape meta-model should guide into a chance for TSP.
The first results of the short-termed field research being based on past, long-termed theoretical combined applied research pillars show that the framework with its applied instrumentations such as the landscape units and the transboundary river basin areas is not only specialized on ideal „prototype region“ of Lusatia and inhabited Spree Forest. Instead, it is able to overbridge risks and needs parallelly in different, and diverse regions while being a transmitter to enable TSP, transformative research for more (land) resilience, sustainability and practice processes in the Ahr Valley and surrounding regions.
Gaining regional (land) resilience in the flood disaster-, COVID-19-impacted Ahr valley together with the further affected regions require greatest amounts of data availability and transferability and in the same time communication, courage, and hope. TSP and the CA(LU)²WA framework is coupled with innovative and well-known assessment methodologies to rebuild simultaneously several destroyed regions, reconstructing them together in a high-ranged, sustainable, resilient future-saving, capacity-building flagship way. This research supports processes around the four pillars in sustainable development and resilience transformations on regional level and landscape scale for buffering future climate change-, disaster-, crisis-related pressures.