The ‘Flood Resilience Rose’: A management tool to promote transformation towards flood resilience

This article presents the ‘Flood Resilience Rose’ (FRR), a management tool to promote harmonised action towards flood resilience in European regions and beyond. Coping with the growing impacts of flooding in EU countries, a paradigm shift in flood management can be observed, moving from safety‐based towards risk‐based approaches and holistic perspectives. Flood resilience is a common denominator of most of the approaches. 

The FRR is a management tool designed for and with practitioners to capture the complexity of flood risk, increase flood resilience and promote a shift towards more comprehensive flood risk management. The main aim of the FRR is to support actors to better understand or communicate how different layers of flood risk management measures (protection, prevention, preparedness and recovery) as well as different levels of operation (multi-layer safety, institutional context, wider context) are interlinked and build on each other. The FRR contributes to the integrative implementation of the EU Floods Directive in national and local settings. In particular, it can serve as a tool that addresses governance within the institutional context. It combines the Floods Directive's requirements with diverse perspectives and needs of stakeholders, taking the multi-functionality of adaptation options into account.