In the last decade, there have been many destructive floods in various parts of the world. Despite the extensive investment in flood control works, neither flood occurrences nor damages are decreasing. A possible consequence of climate change is an increased frequency of extreme meteorological events that may cause floods. Discussion is offered of some recent large floods in the world and of th...

Assessing and mapping damage risk of floods for large river basins is still in its infancy. Damage risk is understood to be the combination of flood hazard and the vulnerability of communities to a flood of a particular return period. Risk is calculated and mapped for two communities in which dykes are not located for flood protection: Meissen on the Elbe River and Döbeln in the Mulde catchment...

Due to a number of recent high-profile flood events and the apparent threat from global warming, governments and their agencies are under pressure to make proactive investments to protect people living in floodplains. However, adopting a proactive approach as a universal strategy is not affordable. It has been argued that delaying expensive and essentially irreversible capital decisions could b...

The use of engineering risk analysis and multi-objective decision-making under risk are considered as tools for floodplain management and extreme flood protection. Distinction is made between (a) the catchment or large scale planning and (b) the local or small-scale design of protection measures. After defining the risk of flooding at different scales and specifying the multiple criteria that m...

Liege is located at the heart of the Meuse basin, which covers parts of France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. Considering explicitly this transnational context when conducting flood risk analysis in the area of Liege sheds light on specific features and management opportunities which might otherwise be overlooked. Within a basin-wide collaborative approach, future flood risk was estimat...

agreed to take an initiative on flood prediction, prevention and mitigation. A core group led by the Netherlands and France has prepared a "best practice document" on flood prevention, protection and mitigation to be presented to the Water Directors meeting in Athens in June 2003. The document at hand concerns the " best practice document " , which is an update of the United Nations and Economi...

In this article we investigate the complex relationship between environmental risk, poverty, and vulnerability in a case study carried out in one of the poorest and most flood-prone countries in the world, focusing on household and community vulnerability and adaptive coping mechanisms. Based upon the steadily growing amount of literature in this field we develop and test our own analytical mod...