Editorial

The flooding system in urban catchments needs special consideration and targeted strategies for the prevention and mitigation of flood risks in urban areas as illustrated in the Pitt Review of the widespread urban flooding in Eng-land in 2007 (http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/pittreview/ thepittreview.html). In the past two decades, much research effort has been devoted to the assessment and analysis of flood vulnerability. The European Commission has been supporting this research since the early 1990s through its successive Framework Programmes for research and tech-nological development. Much of this has focused on large river catchments, coastal erosion and inundation, with only limited research considering the highly complex and dynamic urban context. As at the moment, many countries are embarking on their own urban flood risk management strategy – with greater or lesser effectiveness – there is a need to exchange best practices for flood risk management for these urban catchments at a European level. With this inten-tion, the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (EU COST) office launched the new action C22 – Urban Flood Management (COST-UFM) in 2005. More than 50 scientists and practitioners from 13 European nations coop-erated in this action with the objective to build upon the previous and current European research (such as FLOOD-site) and practice in urban flood risk, to highlight weaknesses of today’s knowledge and practice in urban flood manage-ment, to provide examples of best practice and to help support the European Union in providing a framework for future. The thematic structure of COST-UFM reflected the need for urban flood risk management to deal with the flood problem in a holistic way using resilience as a guiding prin-ciple. Resilience, as applied to the flooding system, is defined here in a very broad sense as the capacity of the whole system to absorb flood waves in annual variability and to reorganize while undergoing change in flood probability or severity. The absorptive capacity has three critical aspects: threshold/ resistive capacity (avoiding flood losses), coping capacity (alleviating flood losses) and recovery capacity (recovering from flood losses). The reorganizing capacity refers to the capacity of the system management (i.e. the individuals and groups acting to manage the system) to influence the threshold/resistive, coping and recovery capacity. In 2009, COST-UFM ended with an international conference. On behalf of the International Hydrological Program of UNESCO and EU COST politicians, policymakers and decision-makers, researchers and practitioners from all over the world attended the closing event of the COST action, the final conference: Road Map Towards a Flood Resilient Urban Environment. This conference was organized jointly by UNESCO-International Hydrological Programme and COST-UFM in the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris on November 26th and 27th, 2009, with the intention to combine the forces of global and European communities. Participants from 23 countries witnessed an event in which a representative selection of the world’s knowledge on this emerging topic of flood risk management was presented and discussed. About 100 papers were selected for presentation. These highlighted the recent advances towards flood-resilient cities. The Editorial Board of the Journal of Flood Risk Management (JFRM) has taken this opportunity to release a special edition of the journal in which a selection of papers from the conference provides information related to the four main topics of the conference. In Section A, three papers address the topic of ‘policy, decision making and the role of institutions’ in the development of flood-resilient cities. They focus on appropriate policies, regulations, institutions and actors to respond to the pressures and needs to adapt cities to climate change and socio-economic drivers. In Section B, three papers deal with the ‘impact assessment of climate change and anthropogenic drivers’. These show new ideas of integrated modelling of local-scale climate change and the consequences for urban flood, inundation, vulnerability and damage, including probabilistic methods for the assessment of risk and hazard. Section C covers ‘Resilience Technology and nonstructural measures – source, pathway and receptor control’. The selected papers focus on options for: a) floodresilient-built environment; b) flood-resilient infrastructure; c) SUDS and conveyance systems for exceedance flows; d) management of pluvial, fluvial and coastal flooding; e) emergency responses during and post-flood. Section D addresses the ‘Strategy, communication and capacity building’ to support the transition process from traditional flood defence to flood risk management through empowering the public and others, sophisticated model-based DOI: 10.1111/jfr3.1145