March 21, 2009: IFI side event in the 5th Worlds Water Forum (Istanbul, Turkey)
The workshop on “Charting Global Agenda for Meeting Today’s Flood Management Challenges” was organized by the International Flood Initiative (IFI) to catalyze global agenda toward Integrated Flood Management. The main conveners of the event were UNESCO, WMO, UNU, UN/ISDR, and ICHARM as the IFI Secretariat. Other IFI partners such as IAHS, IAHR and ICLR also took part in the workshop. The workshop emphasized two very important commitments for IFI in the “Water and Disaster” report drafted by the high-level expert panel on water and disaster of UNSGAB as follows: 

1- National government to promptly develop people-centered warning systems, comprehensive flood risk maps and assessments linked to communication systems such as cell phone networks. These systems to include observation and warning for flash floods. The panel requests WMO and UNESCO (via International Flood Initiative) to assist governments in undertaking the proposed actions and invite international financial institutions to support the fulfillment of the proposed actions. (Item No. 2 in annex 1, list of actions)  

2- International Flood Initiative and international hydrological and hydraulic institutes to examine the efficiency and effectiveness of disaster prevention measures and develop disaster preparedness indices for implementation by local authorities. (Item No. 30 in annex 1, list of actions)

Before closing the workshop, dates for the 5th International Conference on Flood Management (ICFM5) were discussed and decided to be 27-30 September 2011. The next meeting of the IFI AC/MC will be held in Geneva on the occasion of the 2nd Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction to be held on 16-19 June 2009.

12 March 2009: The first issue of the IFI Newsletter has been published (PDF, 735KB). In this issue you will read about IFI news and coming events as well as two interviews with IFI partners.

23 February 2009: PIANC announced about the formation of an international working group to study resilience
issues for navigation structures that act as flood defense barriers (PDF, 82KB). The requirement for resilience is to ensure the system does not fail catastrophically if the flood is higher then the design flood.  This group will compile guidance to form something akin to a model building code for flood defense structures. Although this group will be formed around navigation structures the findings will be applicable for all defense structures. Depending on country of origin interested parties should apply through their national PIANC section, if there is any questions about how to apply IFI will put you
in touch with the appropriate contact.

27 November 2008: The website of the 4th ISFD (Toronto, 5~8 May , 2008) has been migrated to this website. Please follow the link to ICFM in the left menu and there you will have options to choose between 4th and 5th conference.

16 October 2008:  The third meeting of the Advisory Committee (AC) and Management Committee (MC) of the International Flood Initiative (IFI) was held at ICHARM on 2 October 2008. The main agenda of this joint meeting was to propose the IFI Action Plan.  Following the review of the IFI mapping activities exercise, the discussion on the IFI Action Plan went to emphasize the role of the initiative in synthesizing what we already know on flood issues and translating available research and studies to an understandable format for flood policy makers. In order to formulate sensible IFI outcomes, three types of IFI products were proposed: 

- IFI briefs: About 2 pages (at most 4 pages); a brochure-type multilingual publication to communicate flood issues and available solutions to governments and policy makers. They can be in a printed format or web-based.