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Flood events are a recurrent threat to economic developments and can jeopardize human existence. In order to reduce the flood risks in Europe on a sustainable basis, the European Union adopted the Flood Risk Management Directive in 2007. The implementation of the directive in the national laws of all member states has laid the foundation for intergovernmental integrated flood risk management on an European scale. The following article is intended to compare and briefly assess the implementation process on inland waters at the technical level in selected European countries in the middle of the process. It covers the different basic structural, methodological, and data conditions for preparing the preliminary flood risk assessment, the flood hazard maps, the flood risk maps, and the flood risk management plans as a result of two EU projects. The technical differences in the various European countries need to be reduced in the next cycles of implementation of the Flood Risk Management Directive.Keywords European Union, flood hazard maps, flood risk awareness, flood risk management plans, flood risk maps, integrated flood risk management, preliminary flood risk assessment

Abstract:The Federal State of Saxony (Germany) transposed the EU Water Framework Directive into state law, identifying 617 surface water bodies (rivers and streams) for implementation of the water framework directive (WFD). Their ecological status was classified by biological quality elements (macrophytes and phytobenthos, benthic invertebrates and fish, and in large rivers, phytoplankton) and specific synthetic and non-synthetic pollutants. Hydromorphological and physico-chemical quality elements were used to identify significant anthropogenic pressures, which surface water bodies are susceptible to, and to assess the effect of these pressures on the status of surface water bodies. In 2009, the data for classification of the ecological status and the main pressures and impacts on water bodies were published in the river basin management plans (RBMP) of the Elbe and Oder rivers. To that date, only 23 (4%) streams achieved an ecological status of "good", while the rest failed to achieve the environmental objective. The two main reasons for the failure were significant alterations to the stream morphology (81% of all streams) and nutrient enrichment (62%) caused by point (industrial and municipal waste OPEN ACCESSWater 2012, 4 888 water treatment plants) and non-point (surface run-off from arable fields, discharges from urban drainages and decentralized waste water treatment plants) sources. It was anticipated that a further 55 streams would achieve the environmental objective by 2015, but the remaining 539 need extended deadlines.

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