Institute for European Environmental Policy                                                                                                         Member of network of academics

LAND4FLOOD: Natural Flood Retention on Private Land

   

How to encourage land owners to realize or cooperate in realization of natural water retention measures for the flood damage reduction?

Climate change increases the frequency and intensity of future flood events, leading to higher costs of flood damages and increasing the public demand for protective measures. Traditional flood protection measures, mainly based on grey infrastructure (i.e. dikes, dams, etc), are not sufficient to cope with dynamic flood risk alone. Nature-based solutions such as Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRM) are promising options to mitigate flood risks as a complement to grey infrastructure. However, a common characteristic of green infrastructure measures is that they often claim more land than traditional methods.
The challenge is to consider multifunctional land uses, which enable temporary flood retention and flood storage on private land without restricting the provision of other ecosystem services. The reconciliation of flood risk management and land management is needed. Since all NWRM primarily need to be implemented on private land the consideration of multiple aspects includes: economic issues (e.g. how to compensate for or incentivize flood retention services); property rights issues (e.g. how to allow temporary flood storage on private land); issues of public participation (e.g. how to ensure the involvement of private landowners) as well as issues of public subsidies (e.g. how to integrate/mainstream flood retention in agricultural subsidies). LAND4FLOOD cost action aims to address these different aspects and to establish a common knowledge base and channels of communication among scientists, regulators, land owners and other stakeholders in field.

Project outputs are developed in cooperation with the Department of Geography of the Faculty of Science UJEP.

Funding Agency: COST European Cooperation in Science and Technology
Duration: 11/2017 – 9/2021
Contact Person: Lenka Slavíková, e-mail: slavikova@ieep.cz, lenka.slavikova@ujep.cz
Researchers: Lenka Slavíková, Jiřina Jílková, Jan Macháč, Pavel Raška
Web-site: land4flood.eu
Outputs: Video about LAND4FLOOD

Book Nature-based Flood Risk Management on Private Land

Book Spatial Flood Risk Management

Many other papers, policy briefs and other outputs: HERE