Preface: Current advances in analysis, modelling and mitigation of the costs of natural hazards

Abstract

Assessments of the costs of natural hazards supply crucial information for decision support and policy development related to natural hazard management and climate change adaptation (Kreibich et al., 2014). These costs comprise damage due to natural hazards as well as costs of prevention, risk mitigation and responses to natural hazards. However, recent work shows that cost assessments are often still incomplete, reliable impact data are scarce (Handmer et al., 2005; Gall et al., 2009), damage estimation methods are often crude and insufficient (Meyer et al., 2013; Merz et al., 2010), and the knowledge about costs and benefits of precautionary measures is scattered (Hudson et al., 2014; Bubeck et al., 2012; Kreibich et al., 2011, 2012, 2015). The EU Seventh Framework Programme project CONHAZ – Costs of Natural Hazards (http://conhaz.org/) – collected and reviewed current knowledge on methods for assessing individual cost types, such as direct damage to housing; indirect losses in the macroeconomy; costs due to intangible effects, e.g. on people or the environment; and costs of risk reduction. The project showed how these methods are applied to various natural hazards, including floods, droughts, alpine and coastal hazards. In this special issue, Meyer et al. (2013) present the results of this review and provide recommendations on how to reduce or handle shortcomings and 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 how risks can be transferred, and in what ways cost assessment can function as part of decision support. The session NH9.3 “Costs of Natural Hazards” at the 2012 European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly further provided the possibility for a wider discussion and presentations of new results and developments. This special issue is dedicated to results presented at this EGU session, and it includes papers beyond the CONHAZ project. Current research on costs of natural hazards comprises overlapping topics, which can be categorised as follows: damage documentation and analyses of past events; damage modelling and risk analyses; and precautionary measures including insurance. Individual contributions to these topics are discussed in the following sections. These topics are treated in subsequent sections. Finally, we sum up with a number of overall conclusions and perspectives on the analysis of costs of natural hazards.