Estimating the Inland Flood Risk and Mitigation Effects for Central Europe and the United States

Flooding has been regarded as one of the main natural hazards threatening central Europe and the United States of America (U.S.); its destructive impacts on life, economy, and environment could spread from areas regularly exposed to water to those that are some distance from watercourses and lakes. Estimating regional flood risk is a crucial part of the decision making process undertaken by government mitigating agencies, catastrophe risk managers, and insurance companies to optimally allocate resources and develop sound business strategies. Furthermore, flood losses must be kept as small as possible by the use of flood mitigating measures. However, data about the effects of these measures are rare and consequently the decrease of losses by reducing vulnerability is unclear. To address the above two challenges, a comprehensive loss estimation model was developed, for central Europe and U.S. separately, to estimate inland flood risk and quantify the effects of mitigation measures. The model framework incorporates the event-based fully-probabilistic meteorological hazard model and vulnerability model. The vulnerability model used incorporates a component based approach to capture losses from inland flood events utilizing important structural and regional features such as construction, occupancy types, and building height.