Flood Risk Management in Europe: European flood regulation

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Floods Directive (FD) are the core of European flood regulation. The Directives provide several potential opportunities for improving Flood Risk Governance, but it is not self-evident that all of these opportunities will materialise in all Member States (MSs). This report indentifies the challenges and knowlegde gaps regarding the implementation of the Directives. Instead of the more traditional top-down legalistic approach, these Directives emphasise the importance of more bottom up initiatives from the actors who have to implement the Directives. Combined with the expanded freedom and flexibility for national and local governments, with this new approach, the FD is the first Water Directive in EU law that does not offer an equal minimum level of protection for EU citizens. While both Directives are meant to harmonise European legislation, much flexibility on objectives and measures in the FD is left to the MSs, justified by the nature of flooding and the subsidiarity principle. This creates multi-actor, multi-level and multi-sector challenges. For instance, the FD sets out general obligations for transboundary cooperation, but at the national level, the scope and distributions of duties, rights and powers of the various organizations involved should be set out in law. Other challenges identified in the literature are concrete issues related to mandatory flood risks assessments, flood risk maps, and Flood Risk Management plans, but also the involvement of the public and stakeholders, the science-policy interface, uncertainties related to climate change predictions and effects, the coordination with the WFD, the lack of safety standards, the lack of possibilities for EU citizens to rely on substantive provisions before the administrative courts and finally, transboundary aspects such as issues of scale, mismatches between national policies, the assessment of transboundary effects and division of costs related to this.