January 2013: The 29th issue of the newsletter of the Associated Programme on Flood Management (APFM), a joint initiative of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Global Water Partnership (GWP), highlights, among other things, efforts to assess and promote integrated flood management (IFM) and its participation in the 14th session of the Commission for Hydrology (CHy) and the second European Conference on FLOODrisk Management.

The newsletter features articles on: a three-day exploratory mission by the APFM to Iowa, US, including discussions with the Iowa Flood Center; educational efforts in Japan to teach elementary school children about flood prevention, evacuation and rescue; the second European Conference on FLOODrisk Management, held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, from 20-22 November 2012; the 14th session of the Commission for Hydrology (CHy), held in Geneva, Switzerland, from 6-14 November 2012; and a capacity-building workshop on IFM in Santa Fe, Argentina, co-organized by APFM, from 27 November-1 December 2012.

The publication includes details of APFM’s future work, including the development and implementation of a capacity-building programme to upgrade and extend Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) principles to IFM in Iowa. It also describes some of APFM’s past achievements, including the operationalization of the demand-based outreach strategy of its IFM HelpDesk and its contributions to a planned Coastal Inundation Forecasting Demonstration Project (CIFDP). [Publication: APFM Newsletter nº29]