National Flood Damage Evaluation Methods

This Report is the first deliverable of task 9, called D9.1. It summarises both, the outcome of a literature survey on flood damage evaluation methods in selected EU countries (action 1 in activity 1) and the major results of complementary expert interviews (action 2 in activity 1). The overall objective of actions 1 and 2 in activity 1 of task 9 is to identify the methodological diversity regarding the practical application of flood damage evaluation methods in EU countries, which are known to have a leading position in this field. The results of this report are an important prerequisite for deliverable D9.4, which aims, among other, at proposing harmonised state-of-the-art methods and principles for flood damage analysis in EU countries. The report shows that the four countries England, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Germany, which feature very different histories of flood protection policy and different institutional settings, use sophisticated methods of flood damage evaluation. These in principle follow the same idea, namely trying to put economic values to elements of flood risk in order to estimate the benefits of flood protection measures in terms of prevented flood damage. In detail, though, the methods exhibit a lot of different approaches. The major differences in flood damage evaluation methods relate to the damage categories considered, the degree of detail, the scale of analysis, the application of basic evaluation principles (e.g., replacement cost versus depreciated cost), and the application or non-application of results in benefit-cost and risk analyses. This diversity of flood damage evaluation methods, even in riparian states which share a major river, indicates that there is still a lack in transboundary cooperation in flood policy decision making in the EU.