What is it about?
The implementation of the EU Floods Directive made by water authorities across Europe has generated a lack of consistency in the present situation, especially regarding the scales adopted, the hydrological scenarios and the elements represented on the Flood Hazard and Risk Maps. The paper presents a general overview of the Floods Directive implementation in eight European countries, highlighting the differences between them, with particular attention devoted to the Flood Hazard Maps. For the future implementation cycle that started at the beginning of 2016, a minimization of such differences is necessary in order to manage the flood risk in a better and integrated way.
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Why is it important?
The paper presents a preliminary overview on the outcomes of the EU-funded project HYTECH, regarding the implementation of the Floods Directive in eight European Member States. Despite the small amount of analysed cases, the data reported in the paper can be considered quite representative of the European situation, showing that Flood Hazard Maps result very different across and within countries that results in a lack of consistency.
Perspectives
In general, in order to prepare comparable Flood Risk Management Plans for the next implementation cycles, a huge amount of work is necessary to reduce these differences and improve the flood risk management, in particular in the case of transboundary watersheds. In fact, harmonize and share of these plans could result in an improvement of the work performed by Water Authorities, saving resources and applying best practices and solutions in more cases. A possible way to do that could be the increase of international projects and cooperation, with the aim to have a larger and more structured database. Indeed, it is desirable that, after the next cycle, there will be more comparability and harmonization of flood risk management across the European countries, adopting different approaches such as learning by doing and information exchange. One of the final aims of the Floods Directive is to lead to higher flood risk awareness in Europe, with a gradual change from a safety culture to a risk culture. This requires to take preventive actions at reasonable expense, but also to include the willingness to accept worst consequences in the case of extreme flood-related events and to ensure an open and clear communication of flooding risks across countries.
Dr Michael Nones
Institute of Geophysics - Polish Academy of Sciences
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Flood hazard maps in the European context, Water International, December 2016, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/02508060.2016.1269282.
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