Danube Floodrisk Project Summary

The Danube River is one of the most important natural axes in South-East-Europe. It links most of the countries in the SEE area. Thus the improvement and good examples of transnational cooperation of all countries at this river will be a brilliant signal for the whole region. This project has a far reaching strategic focus beyond risk management and could become a flagship project for the SEE programme. It will improve safer sustainable conditions for living environment and economy in the Danube floodplains. It integrates stakeholders and different acting groups and disciplines.

Flood risk increases with ongoing climate change. Despite the fact that flood events are natural processes, which occurred in the past and will also occur in the future the situation gets worse, especially in terms of financial losses. The increase of industrial and urban settlements in floodplains during recent years and decades, which causes an accumulation of values in areas at risk, leads to immense damages in case of flooding. The catastrophic flood events 2006 in the Danube Basin in particular reveal the vulnerability of our society against extreme natural events. However, the question of occurrence of an event is closely related with the question of the risk, i.e. the consequences (damages) resulting from this event. With the increase of population and industrialization, the settling areas and land use activities spread in floodplain areas seeming protected or hardly affected. Economic values behind dykes and flood protection structures accumulate more and more, hence they increase significantly the potential damage of extreme flood events. It is a matter of all Danubian countries involved to counter this development of flood risks. Partners from the danube countries proposed a three years EC Interreg Project for the Danube Flood Risk delineation, which may contribute with knowledge to understand the processes and which provide the tools to improve risk management in practice.

The DANUBE FLOODRISK project focuses on the most cost-effective measures for flood risk reduction: risk assessment, risk mapping, involvement of stakeholders, risk reduction by adequate spatial planning.

Risk reduction in large international river basins can only be achieved through transnational, interdisciplinary and stakeholder oriented approaches within the framework of a joint transnational project. Practice has shown that starting this kind of cooperation is extremely difficult, due to practical, political and financial reasons. If incentives exist, like the transnational cooperation programme, the start up can be successful. The long term process will be self-running after the starting phase.

The project will bring together scientists, public servants, NGOs and stakeholders who develop jointly a scalable system of flood risk maps for the Danube River floodplains. Transnational methodology and models will be defined and implemented for flood risk assessment and mapping. This results in proposals for flood mitigation measures, adjustments of spatial development plans, assessment tools for economic development in flood plains and raised awareness of flood risk of stakeholders, politicians, planners and the public. Infrastructures at risk like industry, power stations and supply infrastructure will be considered in the project.

Partners: 19 institutions all along the Danube countries, central public bodies, universities, research institutes and operational agencies, NGOs are implicated in the project. Lead partner is the Ministry of Environment, Romania.