Flood Risk Management in Europe: Similarities and Differences between the STAR-FLOOD consortium countries

Description

This report highlights the main similarities and differences between Flood Risk Management Strategies (FRMSs) and Flood Risk Governance Arrangements (FRGAs) in the 6 STAR-FLOOD consortium countries, complemented with some interesting examples from other European countries. It also provides an initial check list of potential factors explaining stability and dynamics in FRGAs and a list of practical questions related to FRGAs in the consortium countries. The findings suggest mutual influences (but not necessarily causal relations) between experiences with floods, the institutional organisation of water governance and the types of FRMSs actually applied. Notwithstanding the differences, similarities between The Netherlands, France, the UK and Belgium have been dentified. All these countries went through some similar stages from a dominant civil engineering paradigm, via a shift towards ‘non-structural measures’ and a wish to accommodate water, towards an acknowledgement of the need to take consequences of climate change into account. In Sweden, on the contrary, the significance of floods has been relatively low until recently (but its importance is expected to increase due to the expected consequences of climate change). On the other extreme, Poland is known to be short on resources for dealing with flood risks. An important conclusion is that FRMSs are not feasible everywhere, but have to fit the specific context.

Reference information