COST C22 Urban Flood Management
Project duration:
- 1 June 2005 -2 November 2009
Funder:
- European Union Cost Programme.
CURE Staff:
Collaborators:
- University of Manchester
- Pennine Water Group, University of Sheffield
- BRE Scotland
- Technical University, Hamburg, Germany
- And 13 other European countries
The main objective of the Action is to increase knowledge required for preventing and mitigating potential flood impacts to urban areas by exchanging experiences, developing integrated approaches, and by promoting the diffusion of best practices in Urban Flood Management.
Since 1950, Europe has witnessed on countless occasions a growing number of floods in urban areas. Climate change and rapid urbanisation will exacerbate this trend. Flooding incidents in urbanised catchment areas can lead to great public concern and anxiety and the economic impacts are often severe. Besides structural measures aiming at a reduction of the probability of flooding, new integrated approaches need to be developed and implemented to adapt the urban environment to climate change by further reducing its vulnerability.
In most European countries the number of facilities and assets that are affected or at least threatened by floods is increasing. This specifically holds for the more densely populated regions along the coast and main European rivers such as Rhine in Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany) and the Randstad (Netherlands), coastal areas in East Sussex and Kent (England), regions along the Elbe and Vistula rivers (Poland) and large areas along the Po River (Italy) and Danube (Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Romania.
In each European country there are river areas with special local conditions. For instance in Finland the rivers going to the Gulf of Bothnia are mostly located within or close to low and wet lands which are especially vulnerable to springtime flooding caused by abrupt melting of snow and ice.
The economic benefits in terms of flood damage reduction are an important criterion for the evaluation, ranking and selection of appropriate flood prevention and mitigation measures. Due to lack of data and analysis of the technical performance of different structural solutions and the economics of implementation and maintenance, and lack of public acceptance, there is often no rationale behind decisions on how to control flood impacts in urban environments.
The main objective of the Action is to increase our knowledge required for preventing and mitigating potential flood impacts to urban areas by exchanging experiences, developing integrated approaches, and by promoting the diffusion of best practices in Urban Flood Management.
Secondary objectives are:
- gather and share information on the subject across Europe with respect to theory, methods, and practical experiences;
- process and present the information in a form that others can learn from it,
- initiate R&D projects for the EU’s 7th Framework programme,
- stimulate national R&D initiatives,
- increase awareness of the importance of UFM in general;
- secure good dissemination of results using seminars, proceedings and papers in journals, a website and harnessing the Spid’O network
CURE staff members have contributed several chapters to the first book resulting from this project:
Ashley, R.M., Vassilopoulos, A., Pasche, E. and Zevenbergen, C. 2007 Advances in Urban Flood Management. Taylor and Francis, London.