Adaptation of flood management plans

The implementation of the EU Floods Directive requires the establishment of public participation mechanisms to ensure citizens’ involvement in the flood management cycle. All assessments, maps and plans prepared according to the Floods and WFD directives have to be made available to the public and uploaded to the common digital repository WISE, managed by the European Environment Agency.

FRMPs call for the input from different levels of institutions (national and regional) and from a large set of competencies. A variety of consultation channels with the public and stakeholders was used and, overall, a broad range of stakeholders was involved in the preparation of the first FRMPs (due by 2015). Among relevant stakeholders, the involvement of private subjects is also very important, as very often private properties are affected, directly or indirectly, by the implementation of the measures foreseen by the FRMPs.

In some cases, the implementation of the Foods Directive has been beneficial in improving and strengthening the lack of coordination and collaboration among different sectors (e.g. flood protection, emergency planning, civil protection, spatial planning, insurance, river restoration), decision makers and stakeholders operating at different spatial scales. Despite such important effort, lack of coordination among different subjects and specifically between FRMPs and national adaptation strategies or plans is still an important gap in the shared management of the flooding risk.

As a result of the flood mapping process, the vulnerability of a wide number of European watercourses and coastal areas was mapped and assessed thus providing very useful knowledge for managing flood-prone areas. However, in the first cycle of FRMPs pluvial flood risk (due to heavy rainfall exceeding the soil infiltration capacity) was not considered equally relevant and its assessment was less detailed if compared to riverine and coastal risk evaluation.

Data availability and human and financial resources required to implement the flood mapping and assessment process, also considering climate change projections, are among the main constraints when dealing with FRMPs.

The Floods Directive adopts the river-basin scale as the unit of management and takes a multilevel approach to goal and standard setting, which is a positive attribute for adaptive governance, specifically in the light of climate changes. However, the lack of proper instruments formally embedded into the legal system that support cooperation mechanism might limit transboundary cooperation. In addition, differences in the legal frameworks, political viewpoints on flood risk management, and economic, social, and physical settings may hamper proper coordination and cooperation between scales.

The preparation of a Flood Risk Management Plan normally follows a 6-year cycle of planning, which requires the involvement of a wide variety of experts, including land and coastal planners, hydrologists, modellers, environmental scientists, engineers, etc. Resource and time efforts to be devoted to the plan elaboration depends on the scale of analysis, the strategic objectives and targets of plan and the availability of data and tools for their analysis. Given its importance, specific resources must be dedicated to stakeholder engagement and consultation, as well.

The EU Flood Directive requires Member States to assess if areas close to watercourses and coastlines are at risk from flooding, to map the flood extent, assets and humans at risk in these areas, and to take adequate and coordinated measures to reduce this flood risk. The Directive also requires Member States to take in consideration the effects of climate change on the magnitude, frequency and location of floods, and therefore to integrate such effects into flood risk assessment, protection, prevention and preparedness.

Besides in the FRMPs themselves, the impacts of climate change and long term developments on the occurrence of floods is part 2 preceding steps of the planning process and of the reporting requirements: both the Preliminary Flood Risk Assessment and the Flood Hazard and Risk Maps should make clear how climate change is included (or not) in the mapped scenarios.

The Flood Directive shall be carried out in coordination with the Water Framework Directive, notably by flood risk management plans and river basin management plans being coordinated, and through coordination of the public participation procedures in the preparation of these plans. Both directives reinforce the rights of the public to access this information and to have a say in the planning process. A separate guidance document “River Basin Management in a changing climate” was produced to support this coordination.

The preparation of a flood risk management plan is based on three major steps each lasting 2 years: (i) preliminary flood risk assessment (PFRA); (ii) flood hazard and flood risk mapping, (iii) elaboration of the Flood Risk Management Plans (FRMP). The implementation time of the plan is highly dependent on the set objectives and targets and the related identified measures.

Flood risk management plans have to be reviewed every 6 years according to the Floods Directive. As far as implementation is concerned, lifetime of specific measures included in the plans depend on the measure typology, varying from months to decades.