Riverine flooding represents a costly hazard in Canada and river ice jams cause a significant ratio of the annual flood damage in several cold countries. Despite a warming climate, weather extremes seem to maintain or even increase the frequency and intensity of ice jams along many rivers, and this justifies investing in the development of flood mitigation measures that emphasize this common, complex, and dynamic winter hydrological process. This presentation reports on different research projects from Yukon and Quebec which goals are to understand river ice breakup from a spatiotemporal perspective as well as from physics-based and hydrometeorological angles. This knowledge proves to be extremely valuable for the development and implementation of successful ice jam flood risk reduction strategies in a wide range of river environments. These strategies include adapted early warning systems to forecast and detect river ice breakup and ice jams, flood hazard maps that accurately take ice processes into account, as well as targeted structural and non-structural approaches to reduce the frequency of, or the exposure to, high water levels caused by ice jams.