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Flood management evolves and changes as more knowledge and technology becomes available to the environmental community. One of the most powerful tools to emerge in the hydrological field is the Geographic Information System (GIS), which allows for the collection and analysis of environmental data. The decision process starts with observed data that supports the creation of information through modelling, the information evolves into knowledge through visualization and analysis, and finally the knowledge supports hydrological decisions.

Operational applications on flood warning require a well-tailored technical concept as well as the consideration of a number of organisational points. Both items are of equal importance for a successful implementation of a flood warning system. Therefore, the first part of this paper is devoted to technical aspects and the second part to organisational ones.

In this contribution it is argued that the current challenge in flood damage research consists in developing a better understanding of the interrelations and social dynamics of flood risk perception, preparedness, vulnerability, flood damage and flood management, and to take this into account in a modern design of flood damage analysis and flood risk management. Accordingly, the sections of this contribution are organised as follows: In the next section the relationship between flood damage, vulnerability and risk perception is analysed and clarified. Section three deals with state-of-the-art approaches to flood damage analysis. The fourth section discusses the shortcomings of the current approaches with a special focus on the disregard for socio-economic factors and methods. Finally, the contribution concludes with an outlook, presenting current EU research efforts to improve state-of-the-art approaches to flood damage analysis.

Large parts of the Netherlands lie below sea level and are threatened by river floods. The flood depths in some areas can therefore become higher than 7 meters. Without the protection of dunes, dikes and hydraulic structures more than half of the country would be almost permanently flooded as is shown in Figure 1. Therefore, flood protection has always received much attention. There is always the possibility of flooding. But how serious is this danger? It is difficult to say. Especially shortly after a (near) disaster the situation is perceived as unsafe. Dunes and water defences protect the country, yet never 100%. There is no such thing as absolute safety against flooding. The question is which risks are acceptable and which ones are not. This is an ever-recurring socio-political consideration, which is fed by developments in the state of knowledge.

The Tisza River Basin is shared by five nations: Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia-Montenegro. The river itself is the frontier along several kilometers between Ukraine and Romania, Ukraine and Hungary and between Slovakia and Hungary. All blessings and all disasters a river can bring are also shared by the five nations. For people living close to the river, it is their source of survival, their friend, their partner, and their enemy. In local languages she is a female. They love her, they fight with her, but they cannot live without her.

A devastating flood hit the German State of Saxony in August 2002. Heavy rainfall, exceeding 300 mm in 24 hours at some locations, led to severe flooding along the rivers and streams and caused considerable damage, particularly in the urban areas.

The Red River flood of 1997 in the eastern part of the Prairie-Great Plains region of North America was the worst on record in many parts of the basin and caused widespread damage in Minnesota and North Dakota in the United States and in Manitoba in Canada. In the flat, wide floodplain, the floodwaters spread up to 40 kilometres wide. It flooded the major regional centre of Grand Forks/East Grant Forks, numerous smaller communities as well as coming precipitously close to flooding the city of Winnipeg.

Flood protection is a complexity of technical and economical measures which communities, towns or regions implement in order to defend valuable properties from inundation. For many historic reasons and partially as a reaction to society’s demand, the protection was established by building dams, levees, pumping stations, dredging, flood plain filling, river training etc. The rapid flood plain development and in some areas dramatic changes of land use produce an ever increasing potential for flooding.

To manage extreme flood events like the Weisseritz flash flood within the Elbe river basin in August 2002 and their adverse impacts on people and properties, practitioners and scientists argue for a shift from the traditional paradigm of flood protection to flood risk management (Schanze 2002, DKKV 2003, Hall et al. 2003). However, developing a risk-based strategy is a difficult task. Directly after a severe flood event the need for an effective strategic approach to flood risk management is usually widely acknowledged. Nevertheless, after some time memories of the event and its causes fade and it is not easy to maintain political support for flood risk management in all relevant policy fields. As a consequence, flood risk issues are often outweighed in political and administrative decision processes (Fleming 2002) such as spatial planning (DKKV 2003). Furthermore, a strategic approach requires continuous co-operation of water authorities, local planning authorities, and regional bodies. But cooperation is costly (e.g., direct costs in terms of time, financial and human resources). Therefore, the request for a strategic approach to flood risk management does not suffice. It should be demonstrated how such an approach can be implemented under real-world conditions (Penning-Rowsell and Peerbolte 1994, Hutter 2005). Questions of how to formulate and implement strategies call for a process perspective (Poole 2004) on flood risk management.

In the Czech Republic the most destructive natural disasters result from floods. Evidence for this was the flood of July 1997 in Moravia and Silesia which took 52 lives and caused damage in excess of 63 billions Kč (Czech Crowns). Similarly the flood in Bohemia in August 2002, took 19 lives and damage ran over 70 billions Kč. The flooding in eastern Bohemia in July 1998 (6 victims, damage 2 billions Kč) was lesser in scope. The occurrence of destructive floods following a long period of relative calm raises the question as to what extent these floods are the results of natural climatic variability or the consequence of anthropogenic conditioned global warming that could result in future increase in frequency and intensity of floods (Houghton et al. 2001, Beniston 2002, Milly et al. 2002, Christensen and Christensen 2003). In order to implement protective measure that would tend to minimise human and material losses it is necessary to establish a knowledge base that would be sufficiently comprehensive, and when necessary to combine the information from systematic (instrumental) hydrological observations with those documentary sources of the pre-instrumental period.