COST Action LAND4FLOOD - Natural Flood Retention on Private Land: Overview of recent activities and future plans

Every devastating large flood usually leads to initiation of different flood risk reduction activities. There are numerous options available how to approach flood risk management. Only limited part of approaches considered land management as significant topic in the flood risk management. Therefore, efficient and effective land management for flood retention and resilience is needed. COST action LAND4FLOOD (CA 16209) deals with natural flood retention on private land. More information about the specific cost action can be found on the web-page http://www.land4flood.eu/ and LAND4FLOOD twitter account @Land4Flood.

Some of the recent activates of the COST action include:

-Organization of series of workshops on different topics such as “Strategies for achieving flood resilience”, “Delivering Nature-Based Solutions (NBS)”, “NBS for flood retention in Southern Europe”, “Compensation Mechanism for Flood Storage”, “Innovative and successfully implemented strategies for achieving resilience in Flood Risk Management with a special focus on private and public property flood resilience” and organization of stakeholders meetings.

-Publication of policy briefs entitled “How Private Land Matters in Flood Risk Management?” that is also translated in French and Spanish and “Compensation for Flood Storage” that is available in Portuguese, Spanish, Czech and French versions.

-Support of multiple Short Term Scientific Missions (STSM) and ITC and conference grants.

-Publication of book about “Nature-based Flood Risk Management on Private Land” and multiple scientific papers.

-Preparation of the LAND4FLOOD leaflet (i.e. http://www.land4flood.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Leaflet-LAND4FLOOD-final.pdf) that is translated into Albanian, Bulgarian, Slovakian and Slovenian languages.

Moreover, the COST action will finish in September 2021, thus there are still several ongoing projects such as open STSM calls, workshop initiations, research project application and book proposals. For example, a recent book proposal that has just been launched will review what we know about flooding land and how to implement spatial flood risk management and resilience. More specifically, as pointed out land is needed for flood risk management. Thus, to store excess water and retain it without major damage. However, this land is often in private ownership. This book proposal will explore different options regarding storage of water in the catchment during flood events: in the hinterland with decentral measures, along the rivers in polders, washlands and in resilient cities. The book will put the focus on land as a biophysical system (including hydrological aspects), as a socio-economic resource, and as a possible solution for flood risk reduction (i.e. asking for policy interventions to activate the land for flood protection measures). These three areas (i.e. hinterland, along the streams, in resilient cities) and the three analytical lenses (i.e. processes to influence stakeholders and interests in land, socio-economic context of land and environmental conditions of land for retention) will indicate how to use land to reduce the impact of flooding.