Institute of River and Coastal Engineering

Preface

In cooperation with the EU COST-initiative C22 a special session on “Urban Flood Management” has been organised at the Aquaterra Conference 2007. It addresses last research accomplishments and best practices in “Urban Flood Management”. This UFM-session contributes to the paradigm change of the new EU flood policy from “Fighting against Flood” to “Living with Floods” and thus has highest actuality. Due to the uncertainty to predict the future development of climate change and its effect on extreme floods, the risk of the flood prone areas can’t be estimated reliably. No longer the areas behind the dikes can be regarded as safe as the residual risk of their failure has increased not knowing to what extend. Recent research work has demonstrated that by improving the resilience within developed urban areas the flood damage can be considerably reduced. This implies a new understanding of flood hazards, giving priority to non-structural and ecologically oriented flood mitigation measures.

Supporting this new flood policy the papers of this book addresses new methods in the hydrologic and hydraulic computation of urban floods, the determination of vulnerability and impact of floods as well as methods to raise risk awareness at stakeholders and the public. Some papers deal with the method of non-structural flood risk management and the relevance of risk awareness, communication, consistency management and socio-cultural environment in coping with urban flood.

The book turns to experts working on the field of flood risk management as well as researchers and students.

At the beginning, several examples of flood situations from various regions of Europe are presented, showing the dilemma and present practice. They cover a wide range of urban rivers from small culverts in central parts of cities, to larger rivers with urban developments on their flood plains and cities affected by coastal floods or urban settlements on islands threatened by flood from the runoff in the upstream catchment. The New Flood policy of the EU is outlined in another chapter, together with planning and educational strategies of integrative flood risk management. Prerequisite for a successful application of this policy are reliable flood forecast and risk assessment models. They are addressed in two final chapters of this book.

Hamburg, 22.07.2008

Erik Pasche
(Session Organizer and Vice Chairman of C22)