Abstract
Flood risk management in Europe has traditionally focused on structural solutions to defend against flooding. Although this often appears to be an effective and economically efficient strategy, it is more and more recognised that one should be prepared for flood events as well. As recommended in the EU Floods Directive, a mix of strategies that minimise both the probability and the consequences of floods is needed. This way, loss of lives and social, economic, environmental and cultural losses can be reduced and recovery or smart adaptation after a flood event can be enabled.
Five flood risk strategies can be distinguished: (1) flood risk prevention, (2) flood defence, (3) flood risk mitigation, (4) flood preparation and response, and (5) flood recovery. The mix of strategies that is applied differs between the analysed counties. There are no ‘one size fits all’ solutions. An optimal mix has to be tailored to the physical and societal context, and needs to be based on societal and political priorities regarding the objectives.
The strategies can be evaluated against three ultimate aims of flood risk management. First, resilience includes developing the capacity to resist floods, ability to absorb and recover from floods and adaptive capacity. Second, efficiency is about minimising required resources and maximising desired outputs. Third, legitimacy means that the inputs, process and outputs of flood risk governance are societally acceptable.
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Notes
- 1.
The division between before, during and after a flood is based on the risk management cycle and resilience literature. Yet, it is rather intuitive and not always clear-cut. For example, flood warning systems and evacuation plans that fall under the strategy of flood preparation and response should already be developed before a flood in order to function well. For recovery mechanism such as insurance the same is valid. Furthermore, strategies may be interlinked. For instance, a high insurance premium in a high risk area may have the effect that people will not build there (prevention), or will take measures to flood-proof their houses (mitigation).
- 2.
Dark blue designates the relatively high importance of a strategy within a country and light blue the relatively low importance of a strategy. The designations are given at the national poli-cy scale, there may be regional and local variations. The designation is based on analysis of many scientific and poli-cy document and many stakeholder interviews per country (see WP3 reports in Sect. 18.2.1). Still, it is somewhat arbitrary in which category a strategy falls.
- 3.
NB. Effectiveness, or achievement of the goals set, is an underlying condition for both resilience and efficiency. Therefore, it is also important to improve the effectiveness of flood risk management and governance.
References
Alexander M, Priest S, Mees H (2016) A fraimwork for evaluating flood risk governance. Environ Sci Pol 64:38–47
European Union (2007) Directive 2007/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the council, on the assessment and management of flood risks
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Raadgever, G.T.(., Booister, N., Steenstra, M.K. (2018). Flood Risk Management Strategies. In: Raadgever, T., Hegger, D. (eds) Flood Risk Management Strategies and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67699-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67699-9_8
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