1. Good Practices on Disaster Prevention in Europe
Floods & Storms Risks

2. Contents Specific objective of this workshop
Floods and storms – good practices inventory overview
Feedback from expert interviews
What are the good practices
Translating good practices into minimum standards
The plan for the workshop

3. Objectives of this workshop
Discuss the good practices on flood and storms disaster prevention collected in the draft inventory.
Define a draft guideline for minimum standards in Flood and Storm risk prevention.
The overall aim of this study is to provide the Commission with an inventory and assessment of good practices in disaster prevention and draft guidelines for minimum standards.
The main purpose of the project is to derive ‘minimum standards’ or principles of good practice in disaster prevention in Europe. One of the key steps toward reaching this objective is to develop a non-exhaustive list and preliminary assessment of good practices in disaster prevention in the EU Member States. This would help facilitate sharing the exemplary good practices across the Member States and should ultimately lead to the establishment of common minimum standards to support good policy and decision- making and effective implementation of preventive measures by the competent national authorities.

4. Floods and storms – good practices inventory overview
Total collected data so far:
91 practices across 22 countries
4 in-depth interviews with experts
The practices have been divided according to the three categories:
Organisational
Informational
Structural (here meaning other risk management measures than information and organisational)

5. Floods and Storms Good Practices
Organisational and informational measures dominate the list of practices with some practices overlapping the themes. Each practice is given a code starting with ‘FL’ for floods and a number. The codes are used to refer to individual practices in the text. The reactions to the preliminary list of practices have been positive and generally considered rather comprehensive.

6. Organizational
Informational
Structural

7. Feedback from expert interviews
The interviews have focused on general discussions on:
1) what constitutes a ‘good’ practice and
2) how to translate a practice into a minimum standard.

8. Feedback expert interviews (cont’d)
A good practice should be at least innovative and stand out from the rest.
The discussion on what separates a ‘good’ practice from a ‘normal’ practice however, is expected to continue during this workshop.

9. What are the good practices
The practices which to date have been assessed as ‘good’ can be divided into dealing with:
Integration
Division of responsibility
Awareness raising

10. What are the good practices - Integration
Practices on creation of flood resilient cities.
Complete analyses of systems of flood risk prediction, prevention, mitigation and reparation = ideal starting point for integrating existing measures in efficient way.
Local prevention policies that combine flood warning systems with improvements of inhabitants’ knowledge and awareness.
Addressing area of flood prevention where environmental impacts are considered along health and economic issues.
Several practices which focus on the creation of flood resilient cities (FL3, FL11, and FL15) were mentioned as particularly good.
Complete analyses of systems of flood risk prediction, prevention, mitigation and reparation, such as that reported in FL87 represent the ideal starting point for integrating the existing measures in an efficient way.
Local prevention policies (FL63 and FL31) that combine flood warning systems with improvements of inhabitants’ knowledge and awareness.
Address the area of flood prevention where environmental impacts are considered along health and economic issues.
Integrated policies are not exclusive to floods but also take other hazards into account. They also often address the entire disaster management cycle.

11. What are the good practices – Division of responsibility
Practices which enhance clear lines of authority and responsibility are considered good and such actions should be kept in focus when developing minimum standards.
The implementation of any new standard practice will hinge on the capacity and clear guidelines to competent authorities and the availability of good practice examples.
In Ireland for example (FL56) the review of the national flood policy focuses on designating roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders for future management of flood prevention.

12. What are the good practices – Awareness raising
It helps to support positive social behaviour by citizens.
Example – Poland, Education in schools.
 This practice should be carried out in parallel to other Polish practices, which support flood risk prevention on a local scale such as early warning systems for local communities and broader education initiatives to local authorities, fire departments, and crisis management centres and media.

13. Translating good practices into minimum standards
Good practices should set a minimum standard for MS to refer to, i.e. minimum standards should be high standards.
Minimum standards will be the minimum obligation MS have to adhere to.
Demonstrate that the standards are based on the good practices; therefore they are feasible and achievable.
They do not denote the “smallest common denominator” but rather the minimum level of quality in DRR.
Good practices should set a minimum standard for MS to refer to, i.e. minimum standards should be high standards. Also, the EC clarified that minimum standards will be the minimum obligation MS have to adhere to. In order for this to work, it is vital that this study shows the background research of good practices, demonstrating that the standards are based on the good practices; therefore they are feasible and achievable.

14. Translating good practices into minimum standards (cont’d)
When addressing the translation of good practices to minimum standards 3 key elements have been highlighted:
Flood zone and risk mapping – EU Flood Directive;
Meteorological and hydrological information services – Integrated Early Warning Systems,
Local prevention policies.

15. The plan for the workshop
Purpose
(a) to help distil a short illustrative list of good practices
(b) to help us understand what really makes a practice ‘good’ and how this can be translated into guidelines
Agenda
Break-out discussion groups:
1) initial inventories
2) good practices => minimum standards
Plenary discussion

16. Workshop summary: Floods & storms
Workshop was useful to see how to best interact the min stds guidelines with existing legislation and initiatives.
 we can learn from guidance and information exchange that is already going on at Working Group on Floods (WG F).
Guidelines should start with a set of overarching principles that can help define good practice
Works well in a given context
Public access to information
Involvement of different stakeholders within decision-making
Principle of subsidiarity
Having a learning culture taking lessons learned into account
Taking interaction with climate adaptation into account
Cannot be contradictory to other environmental goals, etc.
Interaction with existing legislation

17. Workshop summary (cont‘d): Floods & storms
Horizontal minimum standards could give guidance on…
how to extract value out of research and implement into practice
land use planning
disaster loss data collection
monitoring and audit against performance criteria.
capacity building for professionals.
lessons learned on how to raise public awareness using new technologies
one portal for all risk information (all hazards included) and integrated approach to awareness raising.
Integration of early warning systems into risk management plans
cross-border cooperation

18. Thank you for your attention.