Review article: assessing the costs of natural hazards - state of the art and knowledge gaps
By Volker Meyer, N. Becker, V. Markantonis, Reimund Schwarze, J. Bergh, L. Bouwer, P. Bubeck, P. Ciavola, E. Genovese, C. Green and 10 more. 2013
416 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Efficiently reducing natural hazard risks requires a thorough understanding of the costs of natural hazards. Current methods to assess these costs employ a variety of terminologies and approaches for different types of natural hazards and different impacted sectors. This may impede efforts to ascertain comprehensive and comparable cost figures. In order to strengthen the role of cost assessments in the development of integrated natural hazard management, a review of existing cost assessment approaches was undertaken. This review considers droughts, floods, coastal and Alpine hazards, and examines different cost types, namely direct tangible damages, losses due to business interruption, indirect damages, intangible effects, and the costs of risk mitigation. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art cost assessment approaches and discusses key knowledge gaps. It shows that the application of cost assessments in practice is often incomplete and biased, as direct costs receive a relatively large amount of attention, while intangible and indirect effects are rarely considered. Furthermore, all parts of cost assessment entail considerable uncertainties due to insufficient or highly aggregated data sources, along with a lack of knowledge about the processes leading to damage and thus the appropriate models required. Recommendations are provided on how to reduce or handle these uncertainties by improving data sources and cost assessment methods. Further recommendations address how risk dynamics due to climate and socio-economic change can be better considered, how costs are distributed and risks transferred, and in what ways cost assessment can function as part of decision support.
Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88110cc9decb8059094d66808b03996cb3f37dc5
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In Civil and Structural Engineering
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- The behavioral turn in flood risk management, its assumptions and potential implications (2020, neutral): “Despite knowing the existence of these impacts and the existence of some methods to monetize them (Meyer et al., 2013), these intangible or nonmonetary losses tend to be neglected in the practice of risk assessments due to the difficulty of assigning monetary values to nonmonetary impacts…”
- The Monetary Benefit of Early Flood Warnings in Europe (2015, neutral): “However, most studies in this area are usually set within the context of estimating economic damage based on flood risk in general (Carrera et al., 2015; Jongman et al., 2012; Meyer et al., 2013; Molinari et al., 2014; Pfurtscheller, 2014; Saint-Geours et al., 2014; Vilier et al., 2014).”
- The Economic Impacts of Droughts: A Framework for Analysis (2017, methodology): “…Cost-based methods Banerjee et al. (2013) Life satisfaction analysis Carroll et al. (2009) Risk mitigation Cost of implementation Michelsen and Young (1993) Woo (1994) Pattanayak and Kramer (2001a,b) Morton et al. (2005) Grafton and Ward (2008) Source: own elaboration from Meyer et al. (2013).”
- A Multiregional Impact Assessment Model for disaster analysis (2016, background): “…of research has been done to assess a wide variety of disaster losses, ranging from direct and indirect losses, tangible and intangible losses (see Meyer et al., 2013 for an overview of existing literature), to short-term (e.g. Li et al., 2013; Hallegatte, 2014; Koks et al., 2015; Santos et al.,…”