Navas, F.; Malvárez, G.; Penning-Rowsell, E., and Parker, D.J., 2018. Flood Hazard Prevention Appraisal in Europe: Training Key Stakeholders on the Benefits and Costs of Efficient Protection and Response. In: Shim, J.-S.; Chun, I., and Lim, H.S. (eds.), Proceedings from the International Coastal Symposium (ICS) 2018 (Busan, Republic of Korea). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 85, pp. 1546–1550. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.

Coastal floods in the European Union member states produce massive costs in environmental loss but also as flood damage property, infrastructure and economic activity. These costs will increase in the future due to Climate Change. The appraisal of benefits and costs are of key importance in the current economic situation in which Europe's resources need to be distributed with great prudence. In this context the implementation of European Directives, such as the EU Floods Directive (2007/60/EC) require that decision makers need to base their assessments of flood prevention measures on Cost-Benefit analysis studies. But despite this requirement EU member states are basing their implementation in a variety of approaches. In this article the results of the implementation of a new e-learning and face to face training approach based on flood prevention appraisal methodologies (e.g. cost-benefit, multicriteria analyses) is presented. The training programme used significant resources from web-based knowledge platform developed during relevant EU projects including extensive databases with legislative framework, a toolkit with resources on cost benefit analysis calculators and links with spatial data which were deemed essential for flood hazard prevention appraisal. The lessons learnt from the implementation of the training programme are of significance to assess the success or failure of the implementation of key legislative frameworks such as the EU Floods Directive in the future. A prior and post consultation process carried out with the participants showed that a) trainees were successful in developing the step by step procedure using a dedicated calculator; b) trainees also had a more contextualized general picture at EU level of the main issues regarding flood hazard prevention; and c) the trainees found the e-learning and face to face material and the resources very easy to follow and easy to understand, and explicitly recognised the pedagogic value of online availability of course materials.