ConHaz-Costs of Natural Hazards

To strengthen the role of cost assessments in the development of natural hazard management and adaptation planning, existing approaches and best practices for cost assessments as well as knowledge gaps need to be identified. The overall objective of ConHaz is therefore three-fold: 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 economic sectors such as housing, industry and transport, and non-economic sectors such as health and nature. It will consider single and multi-risk hazards, leading to direct, indirect and intangible costs. ConHaz moreover looks at costs and benefits of risk-prevention and emergency response policies, and the extent to which they can be used in economic assessments of natural hazard policies. The second objective of ConHaz is to evaluate the compiled methods by addressing theoretical issues such as principal assumptions of cost assessment methods, as well as practical issues, such as availability and quality of data. This part of the analysis will consider several levels of spatial scale and resolution, i.e. at the micro, meso and macro scales, and compare uncertainties and possibilities of nesting different approaches. ConHaz also looks at the reliability of the end results by considering the accuracy of cost predictions and best-practice methods of validation, and will identify any gaps in assessment methods. The third objective of ConHaz is to synthesize the results. The synthesis will 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. ConHaz will give recommendations according to current best practice, knowledge gaps and identify resulting research needs.