At the Council meeting on 12 May, EU's ministers for justice and home affairs agreed to promote the use of early flood warning systems such as the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) when discussing integrated flood management.

Europe has experienced a number of unusually long-lasting rainfall events that produced severe floods in most EU Member States, including the devastating and costly floods in the Elbe and Danube rivers in August 2002, preceded by the UK floods in 2000, the Oder flood in 1997, and the Rhine/Meuse floods in 1993 and 1995. Moreover, many short-lived but extensive floods occurred due to extreme precipitation in one day, with examples such as France in 2002. Another largely affected region is the upper Tisza river, covering parts of Slovakia, Romania, Hungary and the Ukraine, where devastating floods have occurred almost annually over the past 6 years.

European Flood Alert System (EFAS) was developed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), in close collaboration with the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and National flood forecasting services. The main aim of this system is to provide an early warning information for river floods, between three and ten days before the flooding starts. Actually, it provides earlier and complementary information to existing national tools, allowing Member States and the Commission to be better prepared for upcoming flood crises, the most recent example being the May 2010 flood in eastern Europe.

The system, based on weather and probabilistic flood forecasting, has been developed and tested, and is currently running experimentally at a daily 24/7 basis since 2003 at the JRC's Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) in Ispra (Italy). EFAS is envisaged to run fully operational by the end of 2011. The JRC will further develop the system as a model for other continents.