IAHR_4_S1: Integrated Flood Risk Management from Science to Practice

Climate change has considerably increased flood risk in many regions of the world. Flood risk management is hence currently a critical issue for public authorities, especially if they do not have enough scientific and technical expertise on it. In fact, sustainable flood risk mitigation planning and implementation requires an interdisciplinary team that consists of academic researchers, engineering practitioners, and policy makers with a deep knowledge of the river basin and associated phenomena, as well as of the social-engineering capability of adopting adequate countermeasures within an “integrated” risk management perspective. Still, this is often not the case in reality as transferring knowledge into practice is not straightforward and many obstacles with respect to information transfer, technological development, economic analysis, social awareness, and political decisions may arise. Recent advancements in flood risk modelling, sophisticated measurement technologies, the rapid expansion of internet and computer technology, and the associated possibility to transfer data in real time, are not totally exploited in practical flood risk management (e.g., in design criteria considerations), possibly leading to the adoption of suboptimal strategies, both in real-time emergency response and in flood defence planning. This session aims to bridge the connection between scientific researchers, practitioners, and flood managers. We solicit papers to 1) present bad and good experiences in field deployment and application of flood risk management tools, such as hydrodynamic numerical models or risk analysis software; 2) discuss obstacles in technology adoption for flood defence and management; 3) provide examples on rapid and remote sense-based field data collection in flood events; and 4) present multidisciplinary research and application of flood risk assessment and management.