State of the art in policy development and implementation - From flood management to Integrated Flood Management

The scope of this Third International Symposium on Flood Defence is "Floods, from defence to management". The aim of this presentation is to comment on the need for a paradigm shift from flood defence to flood management and to encourage the symposium to consider another additional shift, to Integrated Flood Management (IFM). The presentation focuses on IFM, a concept, which was developed at the end of the last decade. The presentation provides information oil what WMO did for promoting this concept, what it plans to do in the future and on the recent interest of other organizations in cooperating with WMO for the promotion of this policy and its implementation. One of the reasons for changing from flood defence to flood management is the impossibility to be protected from all floods. The concept of design flood (or instantaneous peak discharge adopted for the design of a hydraulic structure or river control), if properly applied, includes hydrological, economic, social and political aspects, but always leads to making a decision of defending what is to be protected by a certain hydraulic work up to a certain level. Floods larger that the design flood usually were not considered. To take into account these larger floods is also insufficient. IFM has been defined as flood management in the context of Integrated Water Resources Management and considers both the negative and positive aspects of floods. Any human intervention in a basin, with the exclusive aim of reducing negative aspects of floods, could be counterproductive, because it may affect the basin permanently. In summary, what is being promoted is an integrated approach to flood management, in order to maximize the long-term net benefits of floods and minimize the loss of life. In cooperation and with the support of Japan and The Netherlands, WMO and the Global Water Partnership launched, in August 200 1, the Associated Programme oil Flood Management with the objective of promoting IFM. The Programme had an Inception Phase that extended until March 2002 and is now entering the fourth year of its Implementation Phase, which will last until the end of March 2006. Plans have been developed to continue, after this date, through a second Implementation Phase. WMO expects Members to take advantage of its advice for improving their flood management activities, through Integrated Flood Management.