Cities and Flooding: A Guide to Integrated Urban Flood Risk Management for the 21st Century

The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery: Urban flooding is a serious and growing development challenge. It is a global phenomenon which causes widespread devastation, economic damages and loss of human lives.

The occurrence of floods is the most frequent among all natural disasters globally. In 2010 alone, 178 million people were affected by floods. The total losses in exceptional years such as 1998 and 2010 exceeded $40 billion.

Cities and Flooding: A Guide to Integrated Urban Flood Risk Management for the 21st Century provides forward-looking operational assistance to policy makers and technical specialists in the rapidly expanding cities and towns of the developing world on how best to manage the risk of floods. It takes a strategic approach, in which appropriate risk management measures are assessed, selected and integrated in a process that both informs and involves the full range of stakeholders....

[Some of the report's conclusions are:]

• Flooding is having a major impact on millions of people every year and therefore flood risk management measures need to be implemented in the short term
• Impacts from flooding are growing and may become much worse in the future. Schemes must balance the short and long term and integrate structural and non-structural measures
• Successful long term implementation of flood risk management measures requires clear leadership, strong champions and the right institutional and legislative frameworks
• It is critically important to monitor and benchmark flood risk management even when there has not been a flood event for some time.