FLOODSite: Integrated Flood Risk Analysis and Management Methodologies

The FLOODsite Integrated Project will improve understanding of specific flood processes, and mechanisms as well as methodologies for flood risk analysis and management ranging from the high level management of risk at a river-basin, estuary and coastal process cell scale, down to the detailed assessment in specific areas.

It includes specific actions on the hazard of coastal extremes, coastal morphodynamics and flash flood forecasting, as well as understanding of social vulnerability and flood impacts, which are critical to improving the mitigation of flood risk from all causes. Several pilot studies are included in FLOODsite: Elbe, Thames Rivers, Scheldt Estuaries and Ebro coastal delta, among others.

UNESCO-IHE will mainly concentrate on understanding and predicting failure modes of coastal floods, on developing a framework for the influence and impact of uncertainty in the context of flood modelling, and on the web-based knowledge transfer.

FLOODsite aims to deliver:

- An integrated, European, methodology for flood risk analysis and management

- Consistency of approach to the causes, control and impacts of flooding from rivers, estuaries and the sea

- Techniques and knowledge to support integrated flood risk management

- Sustainable “pre-flood” measures (spatial planning, flood defense infrastructure and measures to reduce vulnerability)

- Flood event management (early warning, evacuation and emergency response)

- Post-event activities (review and regeneration)

- Dissemination of this knowledge

- Networking and integration with other EC national and international research.

Floods from rivers, estuaries and the sea threaten millions of people in Europe. Flooding is the most frequent natural hazard across Europe, causing distress and damage wherever it happens. Previous research has improved the understanding of individual factors but many complex interactions still need to be addressed in the practice of flood mitigation. Therefore the first round of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission (2002-2006) included an “Integrated Project” on flood risk management, called FLOODsite to tackle this issue.

To achieve the goal of integrated flood risk management, FLOODsite brings together managers, researchers and practitioners from a range of government, commercial and research organizations, all devoted to different, but complementary, aspects of flood risk management. This project covers the physical, environmental, ecological and socio-economic aspects of floods from rivers, estuaries and the sea. It considers flood risk as a combination of hazard sources, pathways and the consequences of flooding on the “receptors” – people, property and the environment.

FLOODsite is the largest EC research project on floods with a time frame of over 5 years and bringing together scientists from many disciplines along with public and private sector involvement. The project consortium includes 36 institutions from 13 Countries of the EU.

UNESCO-IHE staff is involved in the following Tasks:

· (Task 4) Understanding and predicting failure modes. The research under this heading will gather the substantial body of existing information of defense failure mechanisms and extend knowledge in a number of critical areas. This will be achieved through a review of current knowledge for all kind of defense structures and a detailed analysis of initial failure modes by desk studies and hydraulic model testing.

· (Task 20) Development of framework for the influence and impact of uncertainty. A framework is necessary for the identification and quantification of the influence of uncertainty in the process of flood risk management at all spatial and management time scales. In particular this task focuses on enabling uncertainty to be propagated through integrated flood risk models; providing guidance on issues of scale, complexity and credibility in composite models of flood risk; and providing specific support to decision analysis techniques in policy and emergency situations.

· (Task 30) Web-based knowledge transfer. The developed tools and methodologies will support the communication and demonstration of the findings of the Project to the flood risk management and spatial planning community.

It further contributes to the enhancement and adoption of training platforms based on e-learning, using computer-based modelling tools, role plays, visualization and DSS in the field of integrated flood risk analysis, modelling and management.

With respect to the tasks outlined above, UNESCO-IHE has contributed successfully to the completion of the following:

- (Task 4) This Task has been finished and the report can be downloaded from the Web site

- (Task 20) The methods for uncertainty modelling based on the methods of computational intelligence have been developed, and several papers published in the international journals.

- (Task 30) The E-Flood platform has been designed and several components have been implemented.