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The ICPDR supports the active involvement of stakeholders and civil society on all levels of its work. Two of the most important plans to the ICPDR are the Danube River Basin Management Plan and the Flood Risk Management Plan, aiming to implement the legal requirements of Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Floods Directive (FD), comprising strategic guiding plans for water management over the course of six years. Both are to be updated with a range of public consultation measures.

Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and therefore needs to be recognized as an economic good. In order to protect water as a valuable ressource, investments are needed to be implemented by Danube countries. The implementation of measures is beneficial for all sectors including water-related ecosystems.

Groundwater constitutes the largest reservoir of freshwater in the world, accounting for over 97% of all freshwaters available on earth (excluding glaciers and ice caps). The remaining 3% is composed mainly of surface water (lakes, rivers, wetlands) and soil moisture. By incorporation into the Water Framework Directive (WFD), groundwater became part of an integrated water management system.

In response to the hazard of flooding, the ICPDR adopted the Action Programme for Sustainable Flood Prevention in the Danube River Basin at the ICPDR Ministerial Meeting on 13 December 2004. As a follow-up to this Action Programme, seventeen sub-basin flood action plans were published by the ICPDR in 2009.

17 flood action plans for all sub-basins in the Danube catchment area were prepared in 2009. They provide the first comprehensive overview of actions aiming to reduce flood risks that was ever prepared in Danube River Basin.