Flood protection policies and climate change adaptation in Austria, Germany and Switzerland (Flood-Adapt)

Flood-Adapt has analysed how flood protection policies at and across federal and regional levels in Austria, Germany and Switzerland take future scenarios (including climate change impacts) into account.

The case study on Austria shows that flood risk management decisions are primarily based on historical data and status quo risk assessments. Future changes in flood risk and the related knowledge uncertainties are acknowledged, but they are rarely considered. However, recent developments indicate that flood risk management has become more future-oriented because exposure and vulnerability reduction measures are now a regular feature of Austrian flood policy.

The case study on Germany has focused on the Climate Change Factor (CCF) as precautionary instrument for technical flood protection introduced in Southern Germany in the early 2000s. It concludes that the innovativeness of this instrument faded once the overarching sectoral paradigm had shifted from technical flood protection to more comprehensive flood risk management.

The Swiss case study examines Switzerland’s shift towards integrated flood risk management from a policy coordination perspective. The paper shows that flood risk management in Switzerland displays a high degree of sectoral interplay between hydraulic engineering and spatial planning. By fostering flood-adapted land uses Switzerland’s coordinated flood policies reduce the vulnerability to uncertain future changes in flood risk and strengthen the country’s capacities to mitigate damage in extreme floods events.

A comparison of the science-policy interfaces in the three countries sheds light on how flood risk governance regimes embrace the possible impacts of climate change. Findings show that there is a mixed, though increasing influence of climate change on flood risk governance in the three selected Alpine regions. Climate adaptation has become an important issue of flood policy in all three study areas and this shift has been strongly supported by evidence-based arguments.

A comparison of the Austrian and Swiss case studies focused on how flood policies in the two countries have shifted from a security-oriented approach of flood defence towards a more integrated approach of flood risk management. On the basis of document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews, we characterise the underlying ideas, institutional arrangements and actor-related interests in the two countries’ flood policies, and then discusses the extent of the vertical and horizontal sectoral relations and the empirical evidence for the establishment of boundary-spanning flood policy regimes.

Finally, the comparison of federally organised adaptation and mitigation policies in Austria re-vealed the ambiguity of federalism in climate policy making: While the federal political system in Austria clearly hindered the greening of building policies, its impact on flood protection is not that negative.

Overall, the Flood-Adapt project provides insights into how flood protection policies in three neighbouring countries have developed from technical flood protection to more integrated, forward-looking approaches of water management that also take climate change impacts into account. Apart from progress made in the last few years the project findings also highlight limitations and future challenges of integrated water management.

Keywords: Policy analysis; adaptation to climate change; flood protection policies; Austria; Germany; Switzerland.

Project coordination in Germany: Prof. Dr. Michael Pregernig, Chair of Sustainability Governance, Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg.

Overall coordination: Prof. Dr. Steurer Reinhard, Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resources Policy, BOKU - InFER, Vienna, Austria.

Duration: 01.08.2015-28.02.2019

Funding: Austrian Climate Research Programme (ACRP) - Individual Project