Uncertainty in flood damage estimates and its potential effect on investment decisions
By Dennis Wagenaar, K. D. Bruijn, L. Bouwer, H. de Moel. 2015
132 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. This paper addresses the large differences that are found between damage estimates of different flood damage models. It explains how implicit assumptions in flood damage functions and maximum damages can have large effects on flood damage estimates. This explanation is then used to quantify the uncertainty in the damage estimates with a Monte Carlo analysis. The Monte Carlo analysis uses a damage function library with 272 functions from seven different flood damage models. The paper shows that the resulting uncertainties in estimated damages are in the order of magnitude of a factor of 2 to 5. The uncertainty is typically larger for flood events with small water depths and for smaller flood events. The implications of the uncertainty in damage estimates for flood risk management are illustrated by a case study in which the economic optimal investment strategy for a dike segment in the Netherlands is determined. The case study shows that the uncertainty in flood damage estimates can lead to significant over- or under-investments.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ccb345b1c4b3bb77236693126fb726f36d85d65d
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Multi-Model Projections of River Flood Risk in Europe under Global Warming (2018, background): “To provide a measure of the accuracy currently attainable with state-of-the-art flood damage models, recent works showed that the expected difference between simulations and observations can be of a factor of two or even more [54].”