The research proposal of the STORIES project was submitted in April 2021. After three rounds of reviews of over 4000 proposals in about 8 months, the ERC Executive Agency announced formally on 10 January 2022 a total of €619m awards in its first research grants under Horizon Europe. STORIES is among the approved grants to receive 1.5 million Euro for 5 years. https://erc.europa.eu/news/erc-2021-starting-grants-results

As the host institute, LMU released the news of its four successful grants including STORIES on the same day. https://www.lmu.de/en/newsroom/news-overview/news/four-new-erc-grants-at-lmu.html

Dr. Liang Emlyn Yang is the PI of the STORIES project. He is a scientist and lecturer at the Human-Environment Relations research and teaching unit in the Department of Geography at LMU.

Existing studies on how societies deal with the issue of flooding overwhelmingly concentrate on risk, exposure, vulnerability, damage, loss. Yet the populations living at coasts, river deltas, flood plains, and hilly valleys have not only survived, but actually prospered. Despite many of such examples, there has been a dearth of systematic studies undertaken on them. STORIES aims to close this research gap and analyze this form of societal resilience to flood hazards with a historical perspective. In STORIES, Dr. Yang proposed an innovative resilience thinking (instead of risk thinking) in flood studies. As a primary case study, he will look at the historical Tea Horse Road area, a mountainous region of the Southeast Tibetan Plateau. Beyond the case study, the findings from the empirical study and the quantitative models will be transferred to other problem regions such as the Mekong Delta, thereby making an up-to-the-minute contribution to research into flood resilience.