On the Way to a Flood Risk Management Plan

The Flood Directive EC 2007/60 specifies the structure and objectives of the flood risk management plan and the favourable mitigation measures to be taken for reducing the risk. However, little information is given about the strategy to develop and implement this management plan on a local level. There is an obvious need to find a good governance concept which best supports the implementation process and which will lead to acceptance and proper application of the new paradigm in flood risk management. Within the INTERREG IVb project SAWA (http://www.sawa-project.eu/) the authors have developed and implemented a participatory planning approach for the implementation of a flood risk management plan according to EC FD, which tries to meet the requirements of good governance through broad stakeholder involvement in the planning process. It uses Learning and Action Alliances (LAA) as a communication and decision making platform in which public and professional stakeholders can develop the plan together in a four-step cycle of awareness raising, understanding, experimenting, and evaluation. The software tool KALPYPSO Planer-Client, developed within SAWA, can be regarded as a corner stone in this decision-making process. It enables professional and public stakeholders to define their own scenarios of drivers, flood mitigation and adaptation measures, and to evaluate the impact and efficiency of these scenarios. This new governance approach will be demonstrated with a real case study—the Wandse urban catchment, Hamburg—and the results and experiences will be discussed.