Flood REsilience Enhancement and MANagement: a pilot study in Flanders, Germany and Italy. (FREEMAN)

The overall objective of this two-year project is to assist efforts in improving the resilience of communities in flood-prone areas by means of: - identifying determining factors that amplify or dampen flood resilience as well as strategies and measures that increase flood resilience; - providing guidance on the operational use of ‘flood resilience’ into flood risk management (FRM) and - providing practical policy recommendations to aid the implementation of the EU Flood Risk Directive (FRD). FREEMAN is a pilot project that builds on the outcomes of previous European research projects (to which the project team has contributed) such as Floodsite, Newater and SafeCoast (see related research). FREEMAN will review major flood events in Flanders, Germany and Italy. A comparative case study approach enables the involved scientists and consultants to identify concrete means to increase flood risk resilience for the involved case studies. Furthermore, generally applicable guidelines might be derived from that research.