Contextualizing living with water: a systematic review

Waterfronts are considered attractive settlement locations that provide pathways to trade, sources of fresh water, food, and other environmental and social services. As a result, human populations have always inhabited the edge between land and water, despite fluctuating water levels, erosion, and other hazards. With the growth in waterfront settlements, these edges are now largely developed, leading to increased levels of vulnerability. This problem has been exacerbated by climate change. Consequently, many waterfront strategies are often geared towards ‘hard’ engineering resilience measures, although there are gradual changes towards Socio-ecological resilience measures that is embedded in the ‘living with water’ concept. Given this, a closer look at the literature on living with water reveals that there is inadequate literature that concurrently contextualizes other like-minded concepts with resilience. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach, this study reviews current waterfront literature from 2000 to 2023 to examine the concept of living with water, its current strategies and gaps within the context of the resilience. The authors reviewed 123 waterfront-resilient articles obtained from the Scopus database. The findings indicate that key issues in developed countries bordered neoliberalism and climate justice, while issues of fragmented institutions and poor enforcement were emerging issues in developing countries. The authors recommend that, for developed economies, stakeholders must understand and engage potential trade-offs to arrive at a consensus that satisfies climate justice. For developing economies, an integrated policy approach is required to develop resilient waterfront communities.