Understanding and Managing Floods: an Interdisciplinary Challenge

Floods are among the most devastating natural (and sometimes human-produced) threats on earth, accounting for an annual flood damage over $100 billion. The risk at which people are exposed depends on many factors: the type of flood events, their magnitude, how frequently they occur, the susceptibility of the people and their properties to be adversely affected, and their preparedness in the emergency situations caused by floods. The scope of this collection is to review the recent research on understanding all these factors of flood risk and on managing it, accounting for the ongoing changes in society, landscape and climate. The collection is organized in four parts : (1) Theorizing Flooding, i.e., what are the theoretical frameworks that define floods and flood risk from the physical and social perspectives; (2) The Evidence Base, i.e., what is the current understanding on flood processes and how data can be used to improve it; (3) Forecasting Floods, i.e., what are the flood forecasting methods and how are they implemented at different spatial scales; and (4) Flood management, i.e., what can be done to reduce hazard and vulnerability and to increase resilience to flooding.