Table of contents
- 0. Flood Risk - general comments
- 1. Executive summary
- 2. Introduction
- 2.1 Floods in Europe
- 2.2 Environmental aspects of floods and floodplains
- 2.3 Floodplain areas areas
- 2.4 Strategic flood risk management
- 2.5 Outline and reading guidance
- 3 Status of Europe's floodplains
- 3.1 Environmental importance of floodplains
- 3.2 Status of Europe’s floodplains: remaining areas and environmental quality
- 3.3 Anthropogenic Drivers and Pressures
- 3.4 Floodplain management and restoration
- 4 Policy developments and implementation
- 4.1 European policies influencing the management of floods and floodplains
- 4.2 Flood risk management, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction
- 4.3 Gaps in knowledge and policy integration
- 5 Conclusions
- 5.1 Data on floods and floodplains
- 5.2 Floodplains in Europe
- 5.3 Coordination of flood risk management with adjacent policy fields
- Acronyms and abbreviations
- References
5 Conclusions
please provide general comments on chapter 5 here
(the bullet points will be redrafted for the final version)
“More than any other environmental hazard, floods bring benefits as well as losses” (Smith, 1996).
Floods serve as ecological ‘reset’ buttons because of the drastic way they alter the landscape. Considerable volumes of sediment are moved during flood events: eroded from soils on the banks, sorted and transported sediments from the bed and deposited in floodplains and other areas where the flow velocity is low. These sedimentation processes serve to create and rejuvenate habitats.
Where flooding as such is beneficial for the environment, hard/grey flood protection measures to safeguard industries, infrastructure, settlements and agricultural land often have a negative impact on the environment. In this regard, the floods directive differs from the WFD and BHDs, where measures have a primary focus on improving the environment; some flood protection measures have a negative impact on the quality and amount of ecosystem services provided. NWRMs and other nature-based solutions must bring the necessary flood protection and maintain, restore and improve the ESs delivered by the river and floodplains. However, this will not be possible everywhere and in the neighbourhood of cities, power plants, infrastructure and industries hard flood defences will remain necessary in the interest of the community. There is no binary switch in between grey and green infrastructure, so even when flood defences protecting against the extremes are seen as a societal necessity the idea of greening the grey can be adopted to maintain protection with minimal loss of habitat and ESs.