The European Flood Awareness System is a European Commission initiative to increase preparedness for riverine floods across Europe.
The disastrous floods in Elbe and Danube rivers in 2002 confronted the European Commission with non-coherent flood warning information from different sources and of variable quality, complicating planning and organization of aid. In response to this event, the European Commission initiated the development of a European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) to increase the preparedness for floods in Europe. Following a Communication of the Commission in 2002 on the Elbe and Danube floods in 2002, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission was assigned with the task to develop EFAS. Its development has been financially supported by DG GROW, DG ECHO, the European Parliament as well as Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia through detachment of national experts.
The aim of EFAS is to gain time for preparedness measures before major flood events strike particularly for trans-national river basins both in the Member States as well as on European level. This is achieved by providing complementary, added value information to the National hydrological services and by keeping the European Response and Coordination Centre informed about ongoing floods and about the possibility of upcoming floods across Europe.
From 2005 to 2010 EFAS was tested in real-time mode, first with the National hydrological services and later also with the European Civil Protection. In 2011 EFAS became part of the Emergency Management Service of the COPERNICUS Initial Operations and in support to European Civil Protection. The operational components have been outsourced to Member State organisations. EFAS is running fully operational since autumn 2012.
The operational EFAS
The European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) is the first operational European system monitoring and forecasting floods across Europe. It provides probabilistic, flood early warning information up to 10 days in advance to its partners – the National Hydrological Services and the European Response and Coordination Centre (ERCC).
The operational components of EFAS have been outsourced to different centres: EFAS hydrological data collection centre, outsourced to a Spanish consortium (Rediam and Soologic). EFAS meteorological data collection centre, outsourced to KISTERS AG and Deutscher Wetterdienst EFAS computational centre, outsourced to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts EFAS dissemination centre, outsourced to a consortium of hydro-meteorological services from Sweden, the Netherlands and Slovakia.
EFAS is running fully operational since October 2012 as a 7/365 service. The Central European flood event of June 2013 was the first big scale crisis during which the operational EFAS was actively reporting to the ERCC.
History
Over the last decades severe fluvial floods of trans-national dimensions have taken place in Europe. There is evidence that in particular transboundary floods can be more severe in their magnitude, affect larger areas, result in higher death tolls, and cause more financial damage than non-shared river floods do. The European Environmental Agency estimated that floods in Europe between 1998 and 2002 caused about 700 deaths, the displacement of about half a million people and at least 25 billion Euros in insured economic losses (EEA, 2003). Some river basins suffered repeated flooding within a time span of a few years only – for example the Rhine and Meuse floods in 1993 and 1995 or the Po floods in 1994 and 2000.
The disastrous floods in the Elbe and Danube basin in summer 2002 acted as a wake-up call for the National Authorities as well as the European Commission to investigate new strategies for flood prevention and protection, with focus on co-ordinated actions among countries sharing the same river basin. Shortly after the 2002 floods, the European Commission announced in the communication COM(2002)-481 the development of a European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) (http://www.efas.eu). Since then, Europe has been hit by several major flood disasters such as the Elbe and Danube floods in 2006 and the Central European floods in 2010 affecting mostly Poland but also the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia.