Implementing the Floods Directive: a procedure for flood risk analysis and mapping

The European “Floods” Directive (Directive 2007/60/EU) asks Member States to develop Flood Risk Management Plans (FRMPs) by 2015. These plans must be based on flood hazard maps and flood risk maps and should address all aspects of flood risk management, taking into account costs and benefits of proposed mitigation tools. This paper presents a methodology to carry out flood risk analyses which support the development of flood risk maps, as required by the Floods Directive. According to the latter, the procedure was designed to be implemented at the catchment scale; the River Mallero Basin (in north Italy) was used as test-area. The procedure presents three main peculiarities. First is its feasibility for the whole Italian territory as data required as inputs have been identified among those which are available for all Italian river basins. Second is the possibility to express risk in monetary terms (i.e. expected damage), at least for those categories of damage for which suitable models are available. This is an important aspects when costs/benefits analysis must be carried out. Last but not least is flexibility. The procedure is organised in independent modules; each module allows the estimation of a certain type of damage (i.e. direct, indirect, intangibles) on a certain sector (e.g. residential, industrial, agriculture, environment, etc.). Thus, analysts can decide to omit the estimation of non significant damages by simply not implementing respective modules; on the other hand, each module can be modified without affecting the whole procedure. This way risk analysis/maps can be continuously updated/improved as required by the same Floods Directive.