When designing the alignment for new embankments, one should keep their likely adverse impacts in view. Particularly, efforts should be made to include floodplain water bodies such as ponds, wetlands, oxbow lakes etc., within the embankments, setting them as far apart and as far away from the main channel as feasible.

Typically, embankments result in steep-sided, trapezoidal, single channel cross-sections, rather than the more natural multiple channels with gentle bank slopes and flat-lying floodplain surfaces. By reducing the area that can be flooded, and by maintaining a larger proportion of the flow in the main channel with lower roughness, embankments decrease the travel times and increase flood peaks downstream. The high depth-to-width ratio of embanked channels makes them inherently unstable during high flows, requiring continuous maintenance.

Removing or setting back the embankments, in parts of the flood plains that are not intensively used for human development, can result in lower water levels and flow velocities, leading to larger in-channel storage and reducing flood peaks downstream. In certain situations where flood plains are used extensively for economic activities, this may not be a viable option. In such cases, a possible option for partly restoring the river-floodplain interaction is to set back the embankments, farther from the main channel thereby partially re-establishing the lateral connection with floodplain wetlands and backwaters and restoring the river’s ability to move about. This also reduces the velocity of the stream, results in lower flood stages, and restores, in part, the natural functions of the flood plain, including temporary flood storage. A river corridor is an enormously complex system, which cannot be fabricated. A comprehensive integrated approach is, therefore, required to undertake removal of embankments including land use planning. Magnitude, frequency and characteristics of floods, geographical setting and socio-economic background of the region have to be taken into account in any given situation. (WMO 2006a)