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Deteriorating levees and recent well-publicised severe flood events have led to international concern about levee performance and failure. This has stimulated the production of the International Levee Handbook. A key starting point for the international authorship team was the acceptance that the issue of failure modes would pervade the entire handbook; a clear, concise and consistent classification and treatment of deterioration and damage mechanisms has therefore been developed with explanations of the ways these can link to generate breach scenarios. The ILH team has also established a relationship between levee form and function and the modes of failure that must be addressed to describe, design and manage a levee system. The team is currently developing methods for the analysis of these failure scenarios and their component mechanisms and the relation of these to the performance and reliability of the levee structure. When complete, the ILH will provide levee practitioners with a comprehensive and definitive guide which will facilitate sustainable design, construction and management practices.

The planet is warming, and many scientists agree that the rise in temperature is human‐made. However, science has not developed a model to predict the effects of increasing temperatures. Still, water utilities can and must plan for the uncertainties of climate change and its effects on water supplies and operations. The findings of a comprehensive case study, conducted by the East Bay Municipal Utility District in California on strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate changes, are presented in this article. Water utilities must include climate change in water supply availability and resource planning and can use this case study as a framework. The information presented in this article is applicable to long‐term water supply planning and can assist with decision‐making.

Abstract.A risk analysis of a levee system estimates the overall level of flood risk associated with the levee system, according to a series of loading conditions, the levee performance and the vulnerability to flooding of assets in the protected area. This process, which requires the identification and examination of all the components that determine the risk of flooding in a system, includes different steps. Among these steps, µlevee system failure analysis ¶, µflood consequences analysis ¶ and µrisk attribution ¶ have benefitted from the most important advances of recent research projects. This paper presents a critical analysis of the latest methods to conduct levee system failure analysis, flood consequences analysis and risk attribution. It shows how these methods can contribute to improving the efficiency of the risk analysis process and therefore the design and management of levee systems.

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