Increased flooding is becoming more prevalent under an increasingly variable future of weather extremes, highlighting the need for effective mitigation strategies. Different flood mitigation measures are available, ranging from classical structural (grey) solutions to nature-based solutions (NbS). This study assessed and compared the hydrological effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and public perception of green (NbS), grey, and hybrid flood mitigation measures in the Gradascica River catchment, Slovenia. For the hydrological assessment, a SWAT + model simulated wetland, retention polder, and dam scenarios. Results showed that wetlands had a minimal effect on flood hazard, reducing flood peaks by up to 3 %, while retention polders and dams reduced flood peaks by 51 % and 73 % and flood volumes by 28 % and 58 %, respectively. The economic analysis found wetlands to be less cost-effective than retention polders and dams. However, it should be noted that wetlands provide additional diverse co-benefits. The public perception analysis revealed significant discrepancies in perceived effectiveness, feasibility, and acceptability of flood mitigation measures across target groups, including the general public, water engineers, researchers, and agricultural advisors. While most groups ranked dams as most effective and wetlands as least effective, aligning with hydrological findings, researchers held a directly opposing view, and the public generally overestimated the performance of green measures. By examining hydrological effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and public perception across flood mitigation measures, the research highlights the need to integrate multidisciplinary approaches to develop robust flood management strategies - an essential lens as communities confront escalating climate-driven flood risks.

Localized climate evidence for agricultural risk assessment remains scarce in northern Ethiopia. This study integrates long-term station observations with CHIRPS v3 and ERA5 to extend climate analysis in Tigray to 2024 and to link sub-regional rainfall and temperature variability directly to agricultural risk. Data from six meteorological stations in south Tigray were combined with high-resolution gridded rainfall and temperature datasets. Long-term seasonal and annual trends and variability in rainfall and temperature were assessed using standard non-parametric trend and rainfall variability analysis methods. Rainfall anomalies identified severe dry years (1984, 2002, 2015, 2022) and wet years (1998, 2006, 2010), highlighting pronounced interannual variability. Regional aggregates revealed statistically significant warming across Tmax, Tmin, and Tmean, with Sen’s slopes ranging from + 0.018 to + 0.046 °C yr⁻¹. Warming was strongest in Tmin, implying reduced night-time cooling and narrowing diurnal ranges. Between 1981 and 2008, temperatures rose steadily, briefly cooled during 2009–2011, then accelerated markedly through the 2010–2020s. Precipitation Concentration Index (PCI) results suggested increasing intra-annual rainfall concentration in some areas, with more rain concentrated in fewer events. Overall, the results indicate clear warming trends with spatially and temporally variable rainfall changes, carrying important implications for rain-fed agriculture. Improved observational networks, combined with downscaled projections, and expanded use of agro-climatic metrics, are critical for robust climate risk assessment and adaptation planning.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are strongly advocated in international environmental discourse and policy agendas for climate risk management. However, a critical knowledge gap remains regarding the extent to which NbS concepts are systematically integrated into higher education curricula, despite the role of universities as institutional settings for developing and disseminating knowledge relevant to NbS. In this study, we examined the degree of curricular integration of NbS within university study programs in water resources management (WRM) and hydrology at the undergraduate, master's, and doctoral levels across 25 countries in 8 geographic regions. Data were collected through a structured survey, and curricula analysis was conducted, in which the proportion of NbS content within each course was categorized into Major (core focus), Moderate (partial coverage), Minor (peripheral inclusion), or NA (no explicit content). Our findings reveal significant regional and disciplinary contrasts. Countries with research-active disciplines, such as engineering and environmental science, and those with formal NbS policy frameworks, such as in the EU, show earlier or more extensive NbS curricular integration. Contrary to the interdisciplinary nature of NbS, we find that NbS are predominantly, yet sporadically, embedded in civil and environmental engineering and natural sciences, with minimal contributions from other disciplines, such as social sciences. Moreover, NbS concept remains insufficiently represented at the undergraduate level as 45.9% of the courses contain Minor content and 33.9% have no explicit NbS content, which represents a missed opportunity for NbS exposure during foundational professional study and training. More substantive NbS content appears in master's and doctoral programs, suggesting that NbS remains a specialized, research-oriented topic rather than foundational curriculum content. Faculty-led NbS teaching initiatives, identified through the survey, though encouraging, reveal a misalignment between high NbS research activity and their low curricular integration, where 31–41% of lecturers in courses with NA and Minor NbS integration do publish NbS-related research. Without explicit NbS framing in WRM and hydrology curricula, study programs may remain confined to specific disciplinary silos, potentially limiting students' overall engagement with NbS concepts. These findings collectively suggest that advancing comprehensive NbS integration in higher education may require deliberate and coordinated curricular reform across institutional levels, highlighting the importance of a whole-institution approach that systematically integrates NbS into curriculum, governance structures, and campus infrastructure.

The use of natural features for hydrometeorological risk reduction has been recently promoted in international strategies and led to an increasing number of actions framed, in particular, as nature-based solutions (NbS). This has sparked a growing debate about the performative role of these concepts in shaping the funding landscape. While several frameworks have been proposed to evaluate the NbS implementation, they can only be effectively applied if NbS and evaluation indicators are clearly defined within and across the individual projects. In this article, we draw upon knowledge representation theory and we provide an evolutionary analysis of the NbS and related concepts and a review of current funding calls in Europe (n = 53) and individual projects globally (n = 342). This allows us to show how NbS have become dominant in recent practical discussions on hydrometeorological risk reduction. While terminological framing as NbS is needed to link individual projects to pre-existing knowledge, our analysis reveals that it can also tend to leverage and legitimise funding. This leads to adverse effects on expert knowledge-building especially in urban settings where hydrometeorological risk reduction necessitates complex approaches, integrating various measures. We assert that too generic NbS framing introduces additional uncertainty in assessments of NbS effectiveness and potentially excludes other viable measures from consideration and implementation. We therefore argue that coherence between the stated NbS and the indicators capturing effectiveness of actual set of measures is critical for gaining evidence from monitoring of hydrometeorological risk reduction projects. For these purposes, we propose a guideline for transparent reporting of aims, concepts, implementation outcomes, and indicators for projects aiming at hydrometeorological risk reduction. Our work highlights the need for global coherence, cross-sectoral knowledge integration, and context-sensitive evaluations to ensure that NbS deliver multiple co-benefits beyond risk reduction.

Climate change is expected to affect the frequency, magnitude and seasonality of various precipitation-related hazards, including flooding as one of the costliest hazards in Europe. As natural hazards have a significant impact on infrastructure, human lives, and habitats, it is clear that adaptation measures aimed at both prevention and mitigation need to be considered to address climate change. Green (referred to as Nature-based) measures are currently being promoted by the European Union, but in some planning contexts these measures may not be fully capable of coping with predicted future climate hazards, especially in the case of extreme events. Furthermore, the implementation of such measures is often met with resistance from planning departments and decision makers due to institutional dependencies created by the use of grey infrastructure measures in the past. In addition, scepticism about the effectiveness of green measures goes hand in hand with a preference for grey measures. Hybrid measures do have a prevailing green visual look, they can fulfil some ecosystem services, but they require substantial technical equipment for implementation and may present a feasible complementary measure in planning context with limited space or already existing infrastructure. These solutions therefore combine parts of grey and green measures and present an alternative that can reflect the diversity of environmental conditions. This study evaluated the effectiveness of selected green (e.g. urban trees, rain gardens), grey (e.g. drywells, permeable sidewalks) and hybrid (e.g. green roofs, stormwater tree tranches) measures on flood risk using hydrological modelling with the HEC-HMS software. This study was carried out in order to define the most effective and suitable flood protection measures for the selected case study, the Glinšcica river basin in the municipality of Ljubljana in Slovenia. Based on the hydrological modelling performed, rain gardens were found to be the most effective measure in terms of reducing peak runoff and runoff volume for the Glinšcica river model. Both green roofs and stormwwater cisterns also showed relatively good results compared to the other measures. The hydrological study was combined with a public perception survey in which we investigated the acceptance, feasibility and effectiveness from the perspective of the Slovenian public. Therefore, we were interested in whether there are differences in the perception of the selected green, grey and hybrid flood risk management measures. We were also interested in which of the contextual (e.g., flood exposure and experience) and compositional (e.g., socio-demographics) factors influence public perception of the acceptability, feasibility, and effectiveness of these measures. Acknowledgment: The research was conducted within the project [Evaluation of hazard-mitigating hybrid infrastructure under climate change scenarios] co-granted by Slovenian Research Agency (J6-4628) and Czech Science Foundation (22-04520L).

Industrial heritage is often highlighted in development strategies as an asset that can be valorized and thus contribute to the redevelopment of old industrial regions. However, the inclusion of industrial heritage in development efforts is based on a specific constellation of perceptions and expectations of local or regional stakeholders, which ultimately transform these efforts into newly revitalized places. Based on semi-structured interviews with representatives of local and regional authorities, traditional industrial companies, NGOs and cultural institutions in an old industrial region in Czechia, we identified three different narratives relevant to industrial heritage: the pragmatic, the problematizing, and the revitalization narrative. Our findings highlight the different perceptions and expectations of the development potential of industrial heritage that need to be taken into account when incentivizing transformative efforts in old industrial regions. While this plurality can generate new insights and ideas, the lack of alignment prevents the emergence of a system-level agency at the regional level that could reshape industrial culture and integrate industrial heritage into a coherent development strategy.

Various flood risk mitigation measures such as green, hybrid and grey measures can be applied to reduce flood risk, which is expected to increase in the future due to climate change. While recent studies on flood risk perception have provided robust empirical evidence of social and regional differences in risk perception, comparative studies on the perception of flood risk management measures are lacking. Across Europe, there are significant differences in the preferred approaches to flood risk management and the identified barriers to their application. As part of this study, we examined the perception of various flood risk management measures in Slovenia, Czechia and the Netherlands. The following concepts were taken into consideration: effectiveness, feasibility and acceptability.The public perception survey was conducted in the three countries via a self-administered online survey with the support of the external company (Bezak et al., 2024). In all three countries, a representative sample (n = 1000) was taken into account considering spatial and socio-demographic characteristics (quota sample). The selected flood risk management measures were divided into three categories: green, grey and a combination of green and grey (hybrid). The visual appearance (green, grey and hybrid), the extent of ecosystem services provided (zero, substantial and in-between) and the construction effort required (substantial, minimal and medium) were used to classify the measures. During the survey, respondents were only shown the drawing of the measure, not the description or the name of the measure. The following measures were considered: rain garden, wetland, tree trench, retention pond, cistern, dam (Bezak et al., 2024). In addition, three groups of experts were also included in the survey in Slovenia: water engineers, researchers working in the field of water management and agricultural workers.In terms of individual flood protection measures, respondents (general public) in all three countries tend to view conventional grey measures (i.e., dams and cisterns) as more effective and acceptable, but more difficult to implement. This is in contrast to green and hybrid measures, which are considered feasible but less effective and acceptable. The degree of perceived effectiveness, feasibility and acceptance varies from country to country (Bezak et al., 2024). A similar perception was also noted by three expert groups in Slovenia, where researchers were the only group to consider green measures (i.e., wetlands) more effective than grey measures (i.e., dams). While water engineers and agricultural workers had similar perception as the general public, with water engineers clearly preferring classic flood risk management solutions such as dams. While specific projects and initiatives can benefit from knowledge of the individual determinants of flood risk perception, transnational policies and strategies should pay more attention to the specific patterns of perception in individual countries. Reference:Bezak et al., 2024. Investigating the public perception of green, hybrid and grey flood risk management measures in Europe. Progress in Disaster Science, 23, 100360, 10.1016/j.pdisas.2024.100360. Acknowledgment: The research was conducted within the project [Evaluation of hazard-mitigating hybrid infrastructure under climate change scenarios] co-granted by Slovenian Research Agency (J6-4628) and Czech Science Foundation (22-04520L).

The intent of the research is to introduce a new strategy which will allow the implementation of small retention elements in the landscape more quickly than the standard approach of comprehensive land consolidation (LC). The average implementation of an LC project takes more 5 years, and the implementation rate of the proposed measures are in single digits. Thus, over the short to medium term, LC will not solve the current problems of climate change and water erosion. One of the main aspects that extends the length of time taken to implement LC in the Czech Republic is the high degree of fragmentation in the ownership of agricultural land. A single block of land can be divided into dozens of individual parcels with individual owners. This very high level of fragmentation leads to a reluctance by the individual owners to farm these small parcels and thus they rent the land out to large agricultural enterprises. This leads to the creation of excessively large blocks of land, which in turn leads to acceleration of water runoff and erosion. Through an analysis of old maps and archival aerial photographs, an area of approximately 250,000 hectares of defunct field paths on arable land were identified. Since these field roads are solely owned by municipalities, they have the potential for the rapid implementation of erosion protection without administrative delays. As these paths frequently follow contour lines, they are often suitable locations for the placement of effective anti-erosion measures. On average, a reduction in erosion-prone areas of 10.85% in each cadastral territory would be possible, with a standard deviation of 10.13%. A potential reduction in areas at risk of more than 10% was identified in 4472 cadastral territories out of a total of 13,077. Using this proposed strategy, erosion-prone areas in the Czech Republic could be reduced by an average of 32.55 hectares per cadastral area, with water erosion potentially decreasing by 107.42 t yr⁻¹ per cadastral area. This equates to a total reduction of 480,382.24 t yr⁻¹ annually across the entire country.

In the Czech Republic (CR), several negative changes in landscape structure before 1989 occurred due to changes in the landscape structure, agricultural intensification, mechanisation, and increased use of agrochemicals. The field roads, borders, draws, retention elements and natural obstacles to surface runoff with significant retention functions in the landscape were ploughed. The resulting extensive land blocks with arable land enabled the rapid acceleration of erosion processes. Due to the high ownership fragmentation of arable land and a lack of financial resources, it is highly time-consuming to overcome administrative difficulties in designing contour-oriented linear erosion control measures (ECM) to interrupt surface runoff and reduce erosion processes. Based on the analysis of cadastral maps, old maps and aerial photographs, we have identified a prospective possibility of using areas owned by municipalities, which are areas of former ploughed field roads (FPFR). The FPFR frequently run along the contour or diagonally across large land blocks. The FPFR are still owned by the municipalities, which significantly accelerates and streamlines the design of ECM by municipalities in these places. We identified these places of the FPFR network for the whole area of the CR. According to the degree of exceeding the maximum permissible length of the slope, we analysed where the placement of elements interrupting the surface runoff on the FPFR can be most effective. The proposed concept can reduce water erosion on 37% of arable land. The average reduction of erosion risk areas is 10.88% per cadastral territory (CT) with a standard deviation (SD) of 19.93%. It represents reduction by 32.59 ha per CT with SD = 73.87 ha and potential reduction of soil loss by water erosion by 107.5 t y −1 per CT.

Landslides cause severe impacts on society, infrastructure, and the environment globally, and their occurrence in some regions is expected to rise due to climate change. Although the cumulative impacts of landslides do not reach the level of earthquakes or floods, their disperse occurrence in space and difficult prediction pose a fundamental challenge for landslide disaster risk reduction effort. Clearly, accurate information is needed both for understanding spatiotemporal occurrence of landslides and their social impacts and responses held by societies. Documentary data are among the key sources that enable compilation of regional landslide databases, allow to quantify the landslide impacts and describe both quantitatively and qualitatively causal chains leading to increased landslide risk and the societal responses to landslide events. In this respect, the documentary data fill the time gap between the landslide occurrence in the past environments studied by proxy data, and the present-day landslides, for which different monitoring and mapping techniques may be used. Over the last decades, important progress has been made in employing various documentary data for landslide research, and extending empirical evidence about advantages and limitations is available thanks to case studies from different environmental and institutional settings. The synthesis of this progress that would guide further research is missing though. The overall goal of this paper is to broaden the perspective on the use of documentary data in historical landslide research, which has so far too much concentrated around the landslide inventories. To do so, we present a scoping literature review with three main objectives. First, we present a classification of both quantitative and qualitative approaches and related research questions in historical landslide research, linking them to key challenges in landslide disaster risk reduction. Second, we review the types and content of available documentary data sources with special attention paid to sources that have been underresearched so far. Finally, we review the quantitative and qualitative methods used to analyse the content of documentary data. While doing so, we draw also from comparative evidence in historical climatology and hydrology in order to point to methods that may hold a potential, but have not been validated in landslide research yet. The paper concludes with identifying challenges and pathways for future research.

Climate change is expected to affect the frequency and magnitude of floods, which are among the costliest hazards in Europe. As natural hazards have a significant impact on infrastructure and people's lives and their habitats, novel measures to cope with climate change need to be considered. Different types of measures, such as green, grey and hybrid solutions, can be used to mitigate the impacts of natural hazards. Green measures (also referred to as nature-based solutions) are currently being promoted in the European Union, but several barriers to implementing these measures exist. The question arises as to what hinders the wider implementation of green measures and therefore results in a preference for conventional grey measures in some countries. This study examines the differences in the perceived effectiveness, feasibility and acceptance of different types of flood risk management measures in three European countries (Slovenia, Czechia, and the Netherlands). The results show statistically significant differences in the perceived effectiveness, feasibility and acceptance of the studied measures. With respect to individual measures, respondents in all three countries tend to view conventional grey measures (dams and cisterns) as more effective and acceptable than green and hybrid measures. However, grey measures are perceived as difficult to implement. The results reveal that the perceived effectiveness and acceptability of the measures are related. The major drivers affecting the differences in the perceptions of different measures are the countries of the respondents and the sociodemographic variables of income and age. In contrast to other studies, experiences with past floods and private insurance are not statistically significant. Our results thus indicate that, along with individual behaviour, aggregate social drivers should be considered when implementing flood risk management measures across the EU.

Climate change is expected to affect the frequency, magnitude, and seasonality of several rainfall-related hazards, including flooding as one of the costliest hazards in Europe. Recent studies have shown that flood risk in Europe is both increasing and decreasing, with increases in most eastern and southern European countries, including Slovenia and Czechia. In addition, significant changes in the seasonal occurrence of floods have also been observed in Europe, thus challenging conventional approaches to flood risk management.As natural hazards have major impacts on infrastructure, human lives, and habitats, and cause large social and economic damages, it is clear that adaptation measures aimed at both prevention and mitigation of impacts must be considered to cope with climate change. To deal with the changing occurrence and characteristics of floods, different types of measures need to be adopted, including green, blue, and grey measures or combinations of these. Although their application is currently emphasized, purely green or blue-green measures in some cases may not be insufficient to cope with predicted future climate hazards. Additionally, implementation of such measures often encounter resistance in planning departments and among decision makers due to institutional path dependency related to the history of utilizing grey infrastructure measures. This is especially the case for some Central-Eastern European countries. An alternative are hybrid solutions that combine parts of grey and green infrastructure, since these kinds of measures can reflect the variety of environmental conditions. However, not much attention has been given to the documentation and evaluation of hybrid infrastructure in comparison to purely green measures. Hence, there are still several open questions related to the implementation and functioning of solutions combining elements of green and grey measures, so called hybrid solutions.The main objective of this contribution is to present the theoretical framework, research design and initial research steps of a newly launched international project focusing on: (i) enhancement of documentation and standardization related to hybrid solutions, (ii) development and testing of applicability and social acceptability of specific hybrid infrastructure in different environments and climate change scenarios, and (iii) environmental modelling and evaluation of effectiveness of different measures from the perspective of the flood risk management. Within the project, the effects of hybrid solutions on flood hazard and hydrological regime of the landscape will be modelled for selected small catchments in Slovenia and Czechia, but the standardization of hybrid solutions will enable to extrapolate our results beyond Central and Eastern Europe. Acknowledgment: The research was conducted within the project [Evaluation of hazard-mitigating hybrid infrastructure under climate change scenarios] co-granted by Slovenian Research Agency (J6-4628) and Czech Science Foundation (22-04520L).

Municipal flood plans represent the lowest administrative planning instrument for flood risk management. Their value for local representatives in coping with floods remains unclear, however. We present a survey of municipal flood plans among 356 municipal representatives in Czechia. Our results indicate that legal and financial incentives are key motivations for adopting the plans; there is a rather weak collaborative effort from private companies when preparing the plans; and the trust in value of the plans is rather low. This calls for stronger integration of local and national expectations regarding flood planning instruments and for new frameworks of their assessment.

With immensely growing pressure on land and its scarcity, conflicting societal expectations concerning land use increasingly result in land use conflicts (LUCs). In this paper, we explore local LUCs, which we define as the complex situations, where fragmented planning policies encounter place-based societal conceptions and perceptions of site-specific developmental priorities. The paper adopts a dynamic approach and introduces a theory-driven typology of potentially conflicting planning decisions. The typology is employed as an analytic framework to reveal the open-ended successive planning decisions that lead to complex local LUCs. Two case studies from Central Europe are explored to narrate the evolutionary complexity of LUCs. Our results show that local LUCs emerged as the past planning decisions lined-up into a sequence creating lock-in situations, where different planning policies can be hardly reconciled. Finally, we discuss applicability, transferability and limits of the proposed typology as an analytic framework advancing management of planning conflicts.

The assessment of landslide impacts provides key information for understanding the hotspots of landslide vulnerability and risk, but it has mostly relied on accounting of immediate social and economic losses while neglecting the long-term implications for local development and respective post-disaster adaptive responses to landslide events. In this paper, we propose and validate an alternative approach that focuses on landslide impacts in terms of their long-term effect on the functional operation of communities and municipalities. We apply a cumulative causation model to historical case studies in rural areas of Czechia (Central Europe). The study is based on a qualitative analysis of written and iconographic documentary data from archives, which enabled us to identify the impacts of historical landslide events and adaptive responses taken by rural communities. We identified sequences of five adaptive responses: abandonment, relocation, resistant recovery, marginalisation, and non-development. Based on validation through the typologically diverse multi-case study, we assert that re-focusing the current research on the long-term implications of landslides for local development provides valuable insights to understand drivers of community adaptive responses, and clarifies the actual effects of landslide hazard on the functioning of social systems in rural areas.

Climate change has increasing impacts of hydro-meteorological extremes on water resources. Projections indicate a similar trend and challenge in the effectiveness of conventional engineering solutions in climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies. Nature-based solutions (NbSs) have been promoted as viable approaches and measures that complement engineering solutions. While the effects of NbSs have been increasingly demonstrated, their broader implementation can be favoured by NbSs knowledge integration in higher education curricula. Knowledge on how the research practice is translated into the educational landscape is missing. This paper adopts the concept of knowledge translation and analyses the integration of NbSs in the study programs of higher education institutions in three European countries (Croatia, Czechia, and Slovenia). Specifically, it explores the extent, thematic areas, and curricular settings of NbSs related to water resources management in implemented curricula at public universities. The results show that NbSs are integrated in a limited number of courses within the relevant study programs (in the fields of, e.g., natural sciences, geography, and engineering and technology) and represent rather an extension of compulsory curricula. Bibliometric analysis revealed that most courses involving the NbSs approach still represent a personalized knowledge, i.e., developed by professors during their research activities. The barriers impairing a broader integration of NbSs in the studied programs are then discussed. Our results therefore indicate that NbSs do not represent a mainstream knowledge that would proliferate into higher education curricula through accreditations procedures, but that the knowledge that is mostly integrated through direct incremental implementation of NbSs in the individual compulsory lessons or facultative courses. We assert that without broader and systematic NbSs knowledge translation to study programs, the effectiveness of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies cannot be fully achieved.

Floods continue to remain among the costliest disasters worldwide and especially in Europe. Among the major causes of flooding are human impacts on water retention in catchments and extensive alterations to floodplains. While several policies and instruments have been coined internationally to mitigate land uptake in floodplains, their impact on recent land use and land cover (LULC) changes remains unclear. In this paper, we provide the first cross-country explorative analysis of LULC transitions in hydrologically delimited floodplains of the five Central-European countries (Germany, Austria, Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia) for the period of 1990-2018. Our results show that there is a continuing pressure for transitions of floodplains to artificial surfaces. The artificial surfaces currently represent up to 15 % of the floodplains in the studied countries, and the increase of 0.7-4.7 percent points in the period under study was mainly fed by transitions from agricultural land. We also found that the major locational driver for transitions to artificial surfaces is a proximity to the sites that are built-up already. Up to 86 % of the transitions occur within 500 m from the nearest artificial surface, denoting continuing urban sprawl. We discuss these results in terms of the differential socioeconomic processes occurring in the studied countries and conclude that the recent policies and programmes did have a rather limited effect on land uptake in Central-European floodplains.

Flood risk management (FRM) aims to integrate necessary technical measures with environmental and societal approaches. Focusing on the process and governance of how to plan, implement, and maintain solutions therefore becomes essential. Among the different stakeholders, landowners are a key group to be considered. This contribution elaborates on the interconnections between land policy, FRM and private land ownership. It is based on the European COST Action network LAND4FLOOD, which brings together academics and stakeholders from various disciplines and more than 35 countries. We argue for a less project oriented and more process oriented approach, a focus on land management and more emphasis on small‐scale measures. This represents a break with some of the recent working paradigms of FRM.

The purpose of the article is to address the gap in approaches to assessing the quality of urban life (QoUL) in small towns, with a particular focus on the environmental dimension of the QoUL concept. The authors examined a statistical relation between life satisfaction and QoUL in small towns, detected the position of the environment among other dimensions of QoUL, and explored the link between the stated and revealed preferences of residents in a small town on the outer margin of the metropolitan area of Prague, the capital of Czechia. The results revealed a pathway to assess trade-offs in QoUL posed by the varying effects of the proximity of small towns to larger urban centres. The discussion focuses on the limitations of exploring stated and revealed preferences regarding the use of the QoUL concept in urban planning. The authors conclude that the worst QoUL compared with overall life satisfaction resulted from the 'bounding effect' of those who were socially and economically bound to the study location. Additionally, they conclude that the environmental concerns represented an important but not major dimension of QoUL, as was also reflected in election manifestos and results.

Urban areas are hot spots of flood risk due to how urban development concentrates people and assets into hazard prone areas, reinforcing negative externalities on the welfare of urban residents. Mitigating flood risk in urban environments, however, is challenging. This is not only because the process generating flood risk is complex, but the objectives of city planners, residents and/or developers are also multi-faceted. Therefore, there are various trade-offs to be considered. One such problem across many areas of Europe and beyond is how to regenerate declined urban areas, to improve the welfare, prosperity, and image of the city. However, in turn, many areas within these cities will see this activity being traded-off against increased flood risk. Cost-benefit analysis rep-resents a useful approach for assessing this trade-off, as a decision-support tool. In this paper we present an exploratory cost-benefit analysis of a potential urban regeneration project within the city of usti nad Labem (Czechia) that seeks to highlight the potential magnitude of such trade-offs that need to be more often actively considered as a core, rather than peripheral, element of urban regeneration. We present an exploratory frame-work that can be expanded upon and integrated into wider regeneration visions.