| The International Centre for Water Hazard and Risk Management (ICHARM) was established in 2006 under the auspice of UNESCO as a Centre of Excellence in the area of water-related disaster risk management. The main objective of this paper is to charting ICHARM’s Integrated Flood Risk Management (IFRM) strategy emphasising on the local conditions in the Lower Mekong River Basin. Recognizing risk as a factor of hazard, vulnerability and exposure (R = H x V x E), flood risk assessment and mapping is one pillar of the proposed strategy. It covers the identification and assessment of risks from floods and their consequences for the future development scenarios in the target areas. Promotion of Flood Hazard Maps is another key strategy of ICHARM, which is also useful for flood response such as evacuation. There is also a need of in depth study on hydrological events in the Lower Mekong River Basin as a part of the strategy. Another key element of the strategy is the study on climate change impact. The mitigation and adaptation strategy will focus mainly on flood preparedness indicators/standards and an approach to establish flood resilience communities with respect to socio-economic processes and human activities. More effective and accurate flood forecasting and warning is part of ICHARM’s IFRM and is targeted to be achieved by introducing Integrated Flood Analysis System (IFAS) as one of the tools. IFAS is a concise flood-runoff analysis system, developed as a toolkit for more effective and efficient flood forecasting, and especially applicable for ungauged or poorly gauged basins. IFAS has implemented interfaces to input not only ground-based but satellite-based rainfall data, Geographic Information System (GIS) functions to construct flood-runoff models, a default runoff analysis model, and interfaces to display output results. In combination with the intended result outputs from ICHARM’s ongoing research for tool development for generating near real-time satellite rainfall information and heavy rainfall area indication, the proposed approach is expected to deliver a more pragmatic IFRM system for the Lower Mekong Basin. |
