The Project

Nowadays, floods risks are importantly high and constitute an acute problem across Europe given the intense rainfalls because of manmade pressure on environment and because of the ongoing climate change.

Floods endanger human lives, cause huge environmental consequences, for example when installations holding large quantities of toxic chemicals are inundated or wetland areas destroyed, while they can also provoke heavy economic losses.

To reduce flood risk countries have to cooperate closely. Due to the Floods Directive (Directive 2007/60/EC), all the European countries have separate and different models, own approaches for flood management, flood prevention and different priorities for mitigation measures. Many regions suffer from lack of risk information for planners, population and most of all, for decision makers. Thus, flooding cannot be completely prevented but there is a clear need for more intuitive collaborative tools that are able to engage citizens in the flood risk management process, as well as ICT based feedback mechanisms that are able to encourage real collective action and behavioural change.

In this context, we have thought that significant risk reduction in large international basins can only be achieved through transnational, interdisciplinary and stakeholder-oriented approaches within the framework of a joint transnational research project that will focus on flood risk management.

So, FLOOD-serv created a system that can access different flood-related datasets across a broad number of different sources (sensors, social media and open data) and make sense of them on different mobile technologies – tablets and smartphones but also on laptops and PCs – in a way that helps the end users (public authorities, emergency personnel and citizens).