Abstract
Abstract. Natural hazards affect many types of tangible assets, the most valuable of which are often residential assets, comprising buildings and household contents. Yet, information necessary to derive exposure in terms of monetary value at the level of individual houses is often not available. This includes building type, size, quality, or age. In this study, we provide a universal method for estimating exposure of residential assets using only publicly available or open data. Using building footprints (polygons) from OpenStreetMap as a starting point, we utilized high-resolution elevation models of 30 European capitals and pan-European raster datasets to construct a Bayesian-network-based model that is able to predict building height. The model was then validated with a dataset of (1) buildings in Poland endangered by sea level rise, for which the number of floors is known, and (2) a sample of Dutch and German houses affected in the past by fluvial and pluvial floods, for which usable floor space area is known. Floor space of buildings is an important basis for approximating their economic value, including household contents. Here, we provide average national-level gross replacement costs of the stock of residential assets in 30 European countries, in nominal and real prices, covering the years 2000–2017. We either relied on existing estimates of the total stock of assets or made new calculations using the perpetual inventory method, which were then translated into exposure per square metre of floor space using data on countries' dwelling stocks. The study shows that the resulting standardized residential exposure values provide much better coverage and consistency compared to previous studies.
Highlights
Residential assets are typically the most valuable components of national wealth (Piketty and Zucman, 2014)
The exposure estimation procedure was first validated by comparing observed and modelled residential building height. This analysis was done through a 10-fold crossvalidation using a 10 % sample of residential buildings in 30 European capitals (Sect. 2.1.2)
In this study we have explored aspects related to estimating exposure of residential assets in Europe
Summary
Residential assets are typically the most valuable components of national wealth (Piketty and Zucman, 2014). Apart from dwellings, residential assets are composed of consumer durables, often referred to as household contents (Kreibich et al, 2017). These are durable goods used by households for final consumption (Eurostat, 2013). 60 % of flood damages and 59 % of windstorm damages (based on the value of insurance claims) caused by hurricane Xynthia in France in 2010 were related to damages to households. This fraction is significantly larger than damages to businesses (32 % and 37 %, respectively) or automobiles (FFSA/GEMA, 2011). During the 2007 summer floods in the United Kingdom households suffered an estimated 38 % of the total value of direct and indirect damages, while companies represented 23 % and public infrastructure with critical services 22 % (Chatterton et al, 2010)
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