Guidance for assessing flood losses

These guidelines are for the purpose in assessing the losses from floods; those who have to make a decision in which the cost of some flood event or potential event is a determinant of what choice should be made. There are many such stakeholders and many potential decisions in which an assessment of the cost of flooding is relevant. It is these different needs that these guidelines seek to address. These guidelines are strategic in nature; they do not set out to be a ‘cookbook’ which would enable a detailed flood loss assessment to be undertaken in each one of the 27 countries of the European Union. Instead, they set out how each of those countries can best go about developing a practical methodology, and associated data, so that flood loss assessments for specific questions can be routinely undertaken.

This report is part of the EU project ConHaz. The first objective of ConHaz is to compile state-of-the-art methods and terminology as used in European case studies. This compilation will consider droughts, floods, storms, and alpine hazards, as well as various impacted sectors, such as agriculture, health and nature. It will consider direct, indirect and intangible costs. ConHaz further examines the costs and benefits of risk-prevention and emergency response policies. The second objective of ConHaz is to evaluate the compiled methods by considering theoretical assumptions underlying cost assessment methods and issues appearing in application of the methods, such as availability and quality of data. ConHaz will also assess the reliability of the end results by considering the accuracy of cost predictions and best-practice methods of validation, and will identify relevant gaps in assessment methods. The third objective of ConHaz is to compare available assessment methods with end-user needs and practices, so as to better identify best practice and knowledge gaps in relation to policy-making. A final objective of ConHaz is to give recommendations about best practices and to identify resulting research needs.