Flood risk management in Europe: the flood problem and interventions

This report has been compiled as part of the STAR-FLOOD project, a European FP7 project (Strengthening and Redesigning European Flood Risk Practices Towards Appropriate and Resilient Flood Risk Governance Arrangements) focused on flood risk governance. The project investigates strategies for dealing with flood risks in 18 vulnerable urban regions in six European countries: England and Scotland in the UK, Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. The report is the first of the four reports that make up the first deliverable of the project. It summarises current thinking on: What is the Flood Risk Management problem? How are floods produced and propagated? What are we trying to achieve through Flood Risk Management? How can we achieve these objectives? What do we need to do? Thus, it focuses upon the nature of the problem and the actions that can or should be taken to address the flood problem in the wider context of the thinking that led to the development of the Water Framework Directive. In methodological terms, the significance of this report is in directing our thinking to the analysis of the governance issues: what is necessary in order to deliver sustainable Flood Risk Management and what are the obstacles to be overcome in order to do so? Thus, within the project, a purpose of this deliverable is to provide a basis for the subsequent work packages, notably work package 2 which is developing a research protocol for the case studies. This work package has been co-evolving with work package 1 with a great deal of cross-fertilisation occurring between the work packages. The simplest summary question that follows from this report for the case studies is: What kinds of competences are necessary to develop appropriate and resilient Flood Risk Management Strategies? Do the actors that are involved have those competences, or alternatively, can additional actors that do have the competences be involved? Does the designated ‘Competent Authority’ have those competencies