Security Of Flood Defenses

This book presents new approaches to security risk analysis and scenario building on the basis of water works such as flood barriers and storm surge barriers. Defending flood barriers is not only important because of climate change and rising sea levels, but also due to the vulnerability of fresh water supplies and the increasing number of people living in vulnerable low-lying river and sea deltas.

Floods are amongst the most common and devastating natural disasters. In the wake of such an event, the pressure to initiate flood protection schemes that will provide security is enormous, and politicians promise quick solutions in the national interest. Jeroen Warner examines a number of such projects from around the world - the Middle East, South Asia and Western Europe - aimed at the prevention of serious flooding. Each provoked a level of controversy unforeseen by its initiators, with the result that schemes were shelved, were not completed, or simply failed. The author shows how such projects inevitably become politicized as different stakeholders seek to promote their interests.

This book addresses the development of advanced methods for the prediction, the estimation of occurrence probabilities and the risk related to extreme hydrological events. It also discusses the reduction of the vulnerability of social, economic, and engineering systems to extreme hydrologic events and the decrease of their effects on such systems.

The OECD and the Directorate-General for Environment, the European Commission department responsible for EU policy on the environment, joined forces to examine current and future water-related financing challenges faced by EU member states. These include investments needed to comply with EU regulation for water supply, wastewater collection and treatment, and flood protection.

This volume is the first in a new series to cover different aspects related to Safety and Security Engineering in order to reach a comprehensive view on risk mitigation.The volume is devoted to floods, as one-third of the annual natural disasters and economic losses, and more than half of the respective victims are flood-related. A burgeoning global population and growing wealth, particularly in the last two or three decades, have increased the risk and the demand for protection from flooding. These features, together with climate change predictions and urban development, are affecting the way flood risk is managed.Knowledge and scientific tools play a role of paramount importance in the strain of coping with flooding problems, along with the capacity building in the context of political and administrative framework. Therefore, governments need to establish clear institutional, financial and social mechanisms and processes for flood risk management in order to ensure the safety of people and property and, thereby, contribute to both flood defence and sustainable development.The present volume contains selected papers presented at the Conferences organized by the Wessex Institute of Technology. The papers have been revised by the Authors, in order to be up-to-date and integrated in the book, which covers the following topics: - Risk assessment - Mathematical models for flood propagation - Effect of topographic data resolution - Social and psychological aspects - Decision making and management - Legislations and directives - Alternatives in flood protection - Response and recovery - Damages and economic-related problems - Case studies The quality of the material makes the volume a most valuable and up-to-date tool for professionals, scientists, and managers to appreciate the state-of-the-art in this important field of knowledge.

In the past thirty years, knowledge on flooding has greatly increased by moving away from purely hydrological and hydraulic science and opening up to other disciplines such as economics or human and geographical sciences. It is as part of this multidisciplinary approach that this book proposes a review of current knowledge on flood risk. It starts with the ever-increasing impact of flooding in order to conceptualize and understand the constituents of risk. Although risk knowledge in modeling methods or naturalist approaches remains essential, it is further developed by the fields of economics, human sciences, geography, environmental psychology and history. This integrated approach to flood risk contextualizes current conclusions on the eventual effects of climate change by showing that human factors are of paramount importance in understanding the process of “risk production . The book sets a state of art around the "flood issue" from the description of the phenomena to the management of risk (dikes, dams, reducing vulnerability, management of crisis...). The chapters are written by specialists but are accessible to the "mainstream scientist". Each chapter exposes knowledge, methodologies, scientific locks and the prospects of each discipline on the theme of floods.