There are many models available which are used in the overall assessment and management of flood risk. However, these mostly only tackle specific issues and there is a need to combine or couple models together to provide decision makers with tools which address the practical management of river systems. A particular challenge is the linking of models of water movement and riverine ecology. It is important that any framework produced should be built as an "open system" which will not be tied to specific proprietary software packages for particular tasks.

Environmental change encompasses both atmospheric and land surface processes. A key change is the trend to a globally warmer climate with regional variability. In terms of flood risk, the climatic forcing will influence precipitation and storm conditions and there are likely to be changes in the catchment both as a natural response to the changing climate and through human adaptation. Planning flood defence infrastructure and river management practice over a time horizon of 20 to 50 years must consider environmental change. It is important to establish how regulation of changes of land use can contribute to reduction of flood risk.

An important technical area for research advance is in the synthesis of the expertise and understanding of the hydrological and meteorological communities. This is important both for real time forecasting and warning and for the development of scenarios for climate change impact assessment. These topics will be considered in greater depth at future RIBAMOD events.

The topic of "scale" covers the need to use data and represent processes at differing spatial and temporal resolutions according to the issue of concern. Transformations between different resolutions can present difficulties, requiring aggregation or disaggregation of data, model parameters and model results. In addition the appropriate representation of the hydro-meteorological system may itself change with the scale of the river catchment.

The discussions touched on the benefits of a common European approach for data exchange across national boundaries and the appraisal of flood risk. These were noted as important and will be the subject of more detailed discussions at later RIBAMOD events.