Background of the study. Due to the increasing intensity and frequency of catastrophic floods occurrence, one of the most important tasks of the water management of Ukraine is to increase the efficiency of the existing system of flood protection due to the implementation of integrated flood risk management methods based on the assessment of flood hazard levels requirements according to Directive 2007/60/EC. The development of scientific and methodological bases for the assessment and mapping of flood hazard and risk levels, as well as the development of integrated flood risk management plans based on them, is an important and urgent task in Ukraine as an associated EU member.
The purpose of the work is to highlight the main works results, performed at the Institute on the study of patterns of riverbed transformations, the development of strategies for flood risk management and scientific and methodological support of the assessment and mapping of flood hazard and risk, taking into account the nature and the intensity of river bed transformation and exogenous processes in river basins of Ukraine.
Outline of the main material. Systematic research on flood protection issues and river bed evolution in IWPaLR has been conducted since the middle of the last century.
The problems of the dynamics of river bed’s evolutions, ensuring the stability of dams, erosion of the tail water of dam, development of active hydraulic structures and their arrangement in river beds, forecasting river bed evolution, runoffs, development study of permissible (nondestructive) flow velocities for alluvial soils, taking into account the phenomenon of self-patching of the river bed, the dynamic equilibrium of the beds, the typing of the beds of mountain rivers, etc., were studied and solved under the natural conditions and in the hydraulic laboratory of the Institute. Based on the results of theoretical and experimental studies of river bed evolution, a number of methodological provisions on the complex regulation of channel deformations and safe passage of high floods were formulated and published a number of regulatory and methodological documents on the calculation and forecasting of river bed transformations, designing of dams and protection structures.
An important role was given to the issues of regulation and redistribution of floodwater by the system of river reservoirs and replenishment of groundwater reserves.
The methodological recommendations for sampling of river bed deposits and sediments, on the base of the international ISO standards’ requirements and recommendations of have been developed at the Institute, as well as the method of estimation of the river bed transformation’s dynamics, for the discrete and quantitative assessments of river bed deformations and their intensity.
The paper also highlights the main results of work on the implementation of the Flood Directive 2007/60/EC in Ukraine, in particular, the development of a Flood Risk Management Strategy in the Ukrainian Carpathian River basins. In the Strategy declared the latest approaches to flood response, which foresee the abandonment of the current paradigm of "flood protection" to favor integrated flood risk management. It defines national mechanisms of strategic management in the field of flood risk reduction, directions of transboundary cooperation, coordination of works within river basins. For the future development of this Strategy, the paper presents the scientific and methodological bases for a comprehensive assessment of the total levels of flood hazard and flood risk and their mapping on a GIS basis.
Conclusion. In the future, scientific research on integrated flood risk management should focus on the study of patterns of evolution of river bed and development of mathematical models of regulation of channel deformations, improvement of the flood forecasting and prevention methodology based on simulation modeling, as well as the development new management schemes for runoff ‘s regulation.
Large-scale stochastic flood hazard analysis applied to the Po River
