Over the last decades Europe has witnessed on countless occasions a growing number of floods in urban areas. Climate change and rapid urbanisation will exacerbate this trend. Flooding incidents in urbanised catchment areas can lead to great public concern and anxiety and the economic impacts are often severe. Besides structural measures aiming at a reduction of the probability of flooding, new integrated approaches need to be developed and implemented to adapt the urban environment to climate change by further reducing its vulnerability.

In most European countries the number of facilities and assets that are affected or at least threatened by floods is increasing. This specifically holds for the more densely populated regions along the coast and main European rivers such as Rhine in Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany) and the Randstad (Netherlands), coastal areas in East Sussex and Kent (England), regions along the Elbe and Vistula rivers (Poland) and large areas along the Po River (Italy) and Danube (Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Romania.

In each European countries there are coastal and river areas with special local conditions. For instance in Finland the rivers going to the Gulf of Bothnia are mostly located within or close to low and wet lands which are especially vulnerable to springtime flooding caused by abrupt melting of snow and ice.
 
The economical benefits in terms of flood damage reduction is an important criterion for the evaluation, ranking and selection of appropriate flood prevention and mitigation measures. Due to lack of data and analysis of the technical performance of different structural solutions and the economics of implementation and maintenance, and lack of public acceptance there is often no rationale behind decisions on how to control flood impacts in urban environments.