Geografski vidiki poplav v Sloveniji

Slovenia is endangered by floods. Frequent intensive rainfall and heavy rains, a large proportion of mountainous and hilly regions, and numerous populated narrow valley bottoms are the primary reasons for this threat. Floods endanger about seventy thousand hectares of lowlands, and torrential flooding endangers a further three thousand hectares. Due to this enormous threat, Slovenia has more than one hundred years of experience in the field of flood prevention, while only more recently has the awareness developed in the European Union that flood prevention is cheaper in the long run than simply dealing with the consequences of floods. This fact is reflected in the increasing number of laws passed to deal with this danger, and for this purpose maps of flood hazard and flood risk are very important and are presented in the book. However, since accurate sources of spatial information on floods necessary to calculate hazard and risk are scarce, the importance of fieldwork was again confirmed. In Slovenia, this method has been in the foreground for decades in the geographical research of natural disasters and played a very important role in the “Geography of Flood Areas in Slovenia" research project conducted by (today's) Anton Melik Geographical Institute SRC SASA with its own and outside experts between 1972 and 1985. The results of our own explorations, based on and combined with the results of this earlier project, are presented in the book. The most extensive chapter offers a description of all the major flood areas in Slovenia and their characteristics, organized according to key hydrogeographical factors, i.e., according to Slovenia’s main river basins. Special attention is given to describing the consequences of past floods, flood protection measures, the relationships between nature and human society that are reflected in the occurrence of floods, and from this viewpoint, possible measures for reducing flood risk. The text is illustrated with more than one hundred documentary photographs.