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The recent flood disaster in Pakistan with the ensuing coordination chaos and lack of information has highlighted the urgent need for flood maps in developing countries. Nationwide inundation maps of extreme flood events can help with infrastructure and mitigation planning, as well as provide essential insight for aid delivery during the crisis itself. The NATO C3 Agency (NC3A) and the National University of Singapore have successfully developed a simple method to create accurate flood maps for developing countries.Keywords Flood hazard maps Á Flood mitigation Á Pakistan Á Developing countries Could the devastating 2010 floods in Pakistan have been avoided? Of course not, and neither can the yearly floods in other developing countries such as Afghanistan and India. Dams, weirs, embankments, and other mitigation measures are too expensive for already struggling states, and, more often, it is simply not known which areas are at risk of flooding. The recent flood disaster in Pakistan (Larkin 2010) with the ensuing coordination chaos and lack of information has highlighted the urgent need for flood maps in developing countries. Nationwide inundation maps of extreme flood events can help with infrastructure and mitigation planning, as well as provide essential insight for aid delivery during the crisis itself. Yet until 2009, it was not possible to create such flood maps because the required input data for inundation modeling generally does not exist in developing countries, nor can commonly utilized modeling software calculate flood zones for very large areas (UNFCCC 2007).The NATO C3 Agency (NC3A) and the National University of Singapore have successfully developed a simple ''reverse-engineered'' method to create accurate flood maps for developing countries (Hagen et al. 2010). This has already resulted in the creation of the Afghanistan Flood Hazard Map (AFG-FHM), which is the most accurate and the principal flood map for Afghanistan; it is accessible to the public and scientific community and can be downloaded from the Civil-Military Overview website (CMO 2009). The

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