4th Workshop of the global flood working group
Introduction
Each year, floods cause devastating losses and damage across the world. Growing population in ill-planned flood prone coastal and riverine areas are increasingly exposed to more extreme rainfall events. With more population and economic asset at risk, governments, banks, international development and relief agencies, and private firms are investing in flood reduction measures. However, in many countries, the flood risk is not managed optimally because of lack of scientific data and methods or a communication gap between science and risk managers.
The Global Flood Working Group is a multi-disciplinary group of scientists, operational agencies and flood risk managers focused on developing efficient and effective global flood tools that can address these challenges. The goals of the group are:
- to develop and improve global flood forecasting and monitoring systems,
- to deploy these systems in a global flood observatory tracking floods in near real-time,
- to build a global flood record suitable for flood risk assessment and
- to make these tools available to organizations and countries that need them.
The 4th Workshop of the Global Flood Working Group will be hosted by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, in Reading, United Kingdom, from 4 to 6 March 2014. The aim of this year’s meeting is to build a Global Flood Partnership and to structure the many ongoing work and initiatives in a coordinated manner to develop prototype products and services useful for national hydro-meteorological services and international emergency response agencies.
The three day workshop will explore ways to coordinate existing efforts in an effective way with a common objective. Each of the five strands of the Global Flood Partnership will be coordinated by key organizations, including the UNISDR, WMO, World Bank GFDRR, Dartmouth Flood Observatory and European Commission JRC.