E D I T O R I A L

Journal of FloodRiskManagement

DOI:10.1111/j.1753-318X.2008.00019.x

The Journal of Flood Risk Management takes an interdisci-

plinary approach to the problems of flooding. Thus flooding

is seen as not merely a physical phenomenon but one that

incorporates the people and organizations that influence or

are subject to flooding and its impacts. By the same token,

the potential responses to flood risks include measures to

reduce vulnerability to flooding and to minimise the

impacts of flood events when they occur, through warning

and evacuation for example, as well as measures to reduce

the probability of flooding. This integrated approach is now

well recognised among flood risk managers and is increas-

ingly being incorporated into national policy. The editorial

by Paul Samuels in the previous issue of this journal

described the European Directive on the Assessment and

Management of Flood Risk, which will lead to the

development of flood risk management plans across the

European Union in the coming years. Last month I had the

pleasure of joining colleagues from the US Army Corps of

Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the

Association of State Floodplain Managers and the National

Association of Flood and Storm Water Management

Agencies, in discussions about the future direction of flood

risk management in the United States. There is a growing

consensus about the challenges presented by climate change

and intensifying socio-economic change. Having already

made the major step towards quantified risk assessment as

the basis for rational flood risk management around the

globe, a further leap is needed now to translate these

methodologies into a future in which ‘stationarity is dead’

(Milly et al., 2008).

The magnitude of the future challenge in flood risk

management is substantial. Global insurance losses due to

flooding are escalating. The UK Foresight Future Flooding

project (Evans et al., 2004) calculated the potential for a

20-fold increase in annual average damages in the United

Kingdom by the 2080s if flood risk management policy were

to remain as it is at present. Different countries are

responding to these challenges in different ways. The Dutch

Deltacommissie recommended, in its report last month

(http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies), a 10-fold im-

provement by 2050 to the already high standards of flood

protection in the Netherlands. Although the risks of

flooding and socio-economic context vary from country to

country, this surely sets a benchmark against which citizens

at risk from flooding around the world will compare their

own situation. The recent OECD study (Nicholls et al.,

2008) on the risks of sea level rise in port cities estimated the

scale of the growing challenge of coastal flooding worldwide,

and showed that some major cities even in rich countries

will have a remarkably high probability of flooding.

The integrated approach to flood risk management

however recognises that reducing the probability of flooding

is only one side of the coin. On the other side is the complex

task of reducing vulnerability. This task is complex because of

the variety of actors, both public and private, involved in

decisions regarding land use and the built environment. There

is little consensus upon the most effective means of risk

communication with floodplain dwellers. In the governance

of communities, responding to flood risk needs to be

considered alongside a host of other factors not related to

flooding. While flooding is distinctive in many respects,

building capacity to deal with flood events may be best

thought of in terms of multipurpose resilience to natural and

man-made hazards in general.

If communities are to be reconfigured to be less vulnerable

to flooding, and in certain instances this may involve

wholesale retreat from the floodplain when the frequency of

flooding or evacuation becomes intolerable, then surely the

settlements they move to should be designed to be both

resilient to natural hazards and sustainable in a much broader

sense. It is clear that many of our cities need to be reconfigured

to cope with the pressures of global change from increasing

population and resource scarcity, including water scarcity and

increasingly costly energy. There are countless trade-offs and

interactions as we think though what sustainable communities

might look like. From the point of view of energy use, denser

cities are much more efficient, and they are also more

cost-effective to protect from external flooding, but they may

not be optimal from the point of view of internal flooding,

which favours open spaces for flood water detention and

infiltration. We are only now beginning to understand and

simulate these interactions. For example, a next generation

integrated assessment model under development at the

Tyndall Centre for Climate Change research (http://www.

tyndall.ac.uk/research/programme6/results.htm) simulates the

interactions between socio-economics, land use, transport,

resource flows and climate impacts in urban areas. This

provides a means of testing alternative adaptation and

mitigation options from a multipurpose point of view, and of

designing the transition to sustainability.

J Flood Risk Management 1 (2008) 131–132 c� 2008 The AuthorsJournal Compilation c� 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Designing the transitions to sustainability, in urban areas,

catchments and coasts, may seem to take us a long way from

the day-to-day business of managing floods. Yet the

interdisciplinary approach, which the Journal of Flood Risk

Management seeks to promote, inevitably implies that

flooding must be considered in a broader societal context.

As the challenges posed by flooding intensify in future, so

too will other drivers of change within natural and built

human environments. Responding to these changes will

require a multipurpose approach.

In many respects what we have learnt about flood risk

management will equip us for dealing with the broader

challenges of global change. Flood risk management

employs techniques of risk-based decision making under

uncertainty, which are transferable to many other domains.

While the importance of resilience and adaptation have

received increasing attention following recent studies, such

as the Stern Review of the economics of climate change

(Stern, 2007), these are concepts that flood risk managers

are experienced at working with in practice. Flood risk

managers are comfortable in seeing their work within the

broader multipurpose context of integrated water resource

management. Thus, global change brings new opportunities

for the lessons that have been learnt from flood risk

management to be applied to broader challenges of utmost

societal importance.

Jim Hall

Associate Editor

References

Milly P.C.D., Betancourt J., Falkenmark M., Hirsch R.M.,

Kundzewicz Z.W., Lettenmaier D.P. & Stouffer R.J. Stationarity

is dead: whither water management? Science 2008, 319,

573–574.

Evans E.P., Ashley R., Hall J.W., Penning-Rowsell E.C., Saul A.,

Sayers P.B., Thorne C.R. & Watkinson A. Foresight Flood and

Coastal Defence Project: Scientific Summary: Vol. I, Future risks

and their drivers. London: Office of Science and Technology,

2004.

Nicholls R.J., Hanson S., Herweijer C., Patmore N., Hallegatte S.,

Corfee-Morlot J., Chateau J. & Muir-Wood R. Ranking of the

world’s cities most exposed to coastal flooding today and in the

future. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Development, 2008.

Stern N. The economics of climate change: the Stern review.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

J Flood Risk Management 1 (2008) 131–132c� 2008 The AuthorsJournal Compilation c� 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

132 Editorial