Bart Vonk, a Senior Advisor in Flood Risk Management at Rijkswaterstaat, has sent an invitation to join a start-up meeting for creating an International Handbook for Flood Emergency Response. If you are interested, he has asked to let them know via this registration form , if possible before June 7.
Bart provided the following information and said was happy to include this invitation on the European Working Group website.
As we all know, floods are posing serious threats to societies worldwide. When not managed properly, they can lead to disastrous consequences, including loss of human life, damage to property and infrastructure, economic losses, and social insecurity.
Over the years, countries around the world experiencing frequently flooding, have developed different successful flood emergency approaches.
Although there are numerous national country-specific handbooks and diagnostic tools on flood emergency management, there is no international standard yet that provides a universally accepted approach, or a shared international flood risk emergency perception between different areas in the world.
Therefore, in addition to the existing handbooks, an international handbook for flood emergency response is proposed to highlight best practices and identify common approaches on flood emergency response between countries. To come to a successful development and implementation of the handbook it is important that it is demand-driven. So the handbook should provide guidelines that matches countries own practice of Flood Risk emergency response.
Until now Rijkswaterstaat, the executive office of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, together with the Dutch Foundation for Applied Water Research (STOWA) has been leading the start-up to develop such an international handbook on flood emergency response. In the last past year we got soft commitments from several partners to collaborate on this initiative. Since this is also a theme in the European funded Interreg project Polder2C’s we have a small budget to make a step forward.
The first step is to invite you to join us in a start-up session on June or 28. Goal of this start-up session is to discuss the goal and the content of the handbook and to give you an opportunity to consider if and how you want to participate.
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