Strategic flood management: ten ‘golden rules’ to guide a sound approach

ABSTRACT

Over recent decades, remarkable progress in cultivating the concepts of flood risk management has taken place across countries as diverse as India, China, Australia, the UK and the USA. This change highlights a risk management paradigm as potentially more complex than a more traditional standard-based approach as it involves ‘whole systems’ and ‘whole-life’ thinking; yet this is also its main strength – paving the way for more integrated and informed decision-making. Strategic flood management (SFM) uses a portfolio of responses to manage flood risks and promote opportunities ecosystem services. It recognizes the interrelationships between the actions taken and the contribution flood management provides to integrated river basin and coastal zone planning. The paper results from an international collaborative effort for research and distils approaches to flood risk and water management in challenging large-scale and complex environments. The paper provides an overview of the emerging good practice in SFM, including (i) an analysis of the flood events that have shaped changes in approach, (ii) the purpose and characteristics of modern SFM, (iii) the goals, objectives and outcomes sought and (iv) the challenges associated with implementation (together with some of the common pitfalls and misconceptions). Our conclusions are encapsulated in a set of ‘golden rules’ that underpin sound SFM decision-making.

Keywords:

• River basin management
• strategic flood risk management
• principles
• international case study
• risk
• opportunity

Acknowledgements

This paper summarizes the findings of collaborative research between the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the General Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Planning and Design (GIWP), Ministry of Water Resources, People's Republic of China and a number of leading international experts from the UK, South Africa, Australia and the USA. The contributions of these organizations are acknowledged. The project was supported by the HSBC Climate Partnership, via a grant to WWF-UK and designed to research and disseminate modern approaches to water management in challenging environments, and provide new insights into strategic planning and risk management of water resources. This paper focuses on strategic FRM and is one in a series of three covering (i) river basin planning, (ii) basin water allocation and (iii) strategic FRM. An extended discussion of the issues raised in this paper is provided in Sayers et al. (2013) with the regional case studies which were commissioned in order to inform these publications available on request. The authors are also grateful to the reviewers used by the Journal of River Basin Management for their challenge and patience.