Bangladesh is known to behighly vulnerable to floods. Frequent floods have put enormous constraints on its development potential. Unfortunately, the frequency of high intensity floods is on the rise. ...So far the country has struggled to put a sizeable infrastructure in place to prevent flooding in may parts of the country with limited success. In recent times, it was found that losses of lives and valuable assets could be significantly minimized by implementing non-structural measures including the improvement of flood forecasting and warning system. The existing flood forecasting and warning capacity of Bangladesh could be more effective if real-timedata could be acquired from upstreamareas within the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) catchment, where runoff is generated. In order to do so, Bangladesh needs to foster an effective regional cooperationwith the other GBM regional countries of India, Nepal, and Bhutan. This article examines how GBM regional cooperation could be useful towards managing floods in Bangladesh in particularand the region in general.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
In the context of the Code Yellow for rainfalls and storms, issued by National Administration of Meteorology (NAM), a downpoor occurred on the 5^sup th^ of June 2012 in the afternoon, between 16.00 ...and 16.30 hours, with maximum intensity in the area of the Dobric - Dobricel - Spermezeu - Pãltineasa - Dumbrãviþa - Cãianu Mare - Cãianu Mic localities. The extreme meteorological event has caused a severe slope runoff. Fortunately, the effects did not include any victims, although they were very severe, judging by the blocking of tens of kilometres of road, the flooding of almost 200 households and several hundreds of hectares of agricultural land. The risk map showing the occurrence distribution of slope flood runoffand associate meteorological events reveals the need of implementing strict measures consisting in: partial afforestation of the two thirds of the cleared slopes, management and diversion of floods that discharge their liquid and alluvial material over the human settlements located in the closest proximity of the slopes, resizing of the access infrastructure (bridges, footbridges) and flood defence infrastructure (dams, runoffdrainage system), scenario-based training of population to react promptly to the development of the extreme hydrometeorological events. On the contrary, the questionnaires applied in the study area reveal a lower preparedness level of the population for an efficient, optimum reaction, in order to significantly reduce the effects of these phenomena. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
In this article, flood protection is considered in the context of sustainability. On the one hand, floods destroy human heritage and jeopardize sustainable development, which can be defined as ..."non-decreasing quality of life." On the other hand, following the most common interpretation of sustainable development, one should not choose flood protection policies that could be rated by future generations as inappropriate options of flood defense. This is how several large structural flood defenses are often viewed. Non-structural measures are in better agreement with the spirit of sustainable development, being more reversible, commonly acceptable, and environment-friendly. Among such measures are source control (watershed/landscape structure management), laws and regulations (including zoning), economic instruments, an efficient flood forecast-warning system, a system of flood risk assessment, awareness raising, flood-related data bases, etc. As flood safety cannot be reached in most vulnerable areas with the help of structural means only, further flood risk reduction via non-structural measures is usually indispensable, and a site-specific mix of structural and non-structural measures seems to be a proper solution. Since sustainability requires thinking about the future generations, the climate change issue becomes important. Non-structural measures lend themselves well to application in climate change adaptation strategies. As uncertainty in the assessment of climate change impacts is high, flexibility of adaptation strategies is particularly advantageous.
The structural measure was the major solution for flood defense in Taiwan. However, the measure is always limited to the design standard and cannot prevent the damages when floods exceed certain ...scale. Therefore, non-structural measures for flood mitigation are the indispensable complements to structural solutions. The study introduces the establishment of inundation potential database that provides required information for the non-structural measures in Taiwan. The database was built by numerical simulations, based on different rainfall scenarios, and has been applied by the local governments of Taiwan for land use managements, flood warning systems, emergency responses, and flood insurance programs to reduce the flood damages and impacts.
The disastrous flood of 1998 was a result of excessive rainfall all over the catchment areas of the major rivers of Bangladesh. Dhaka City, which is surrounded by rivers on all sides, was seriously ...affected despite the completion of Phase I of the Dhaka Integrated Flood Protection Project (DIFPP). Water entered into the protected part of the city through hydraulic leakage such as buried sewerage pipes, breached and incomplete floodwalls, ungated culverts and inoperative regulators. The drainage network and retention ponds of the city were found to be in poor conditions and capacities of the pumping stations were found inadequate. There was a serious lack of coordination between the agencies responsible for flood protection and drainage of the city. These issues must be addressed to achieve long-term flood mitigation. In addition, feedback from both the experts and general public indicated that completion of Phase II of DIFPP was essential to bring the eastern part of the city under flood protection. Other structural measures suggested in this paper include installing and maintaining adequate drainage and pumping capacity and timely operation of regulators. This study also suggests a set of non-structural measures for flood mitigation that include protecting the retention ponds, raising public awareness on maintaining the city drains, introducing land zoning and flood proofing in the eastern part of Dhaka, and stream lining institutional bottlenecks.
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