TY - JOUR A1 - Hudson, Paul A1 - Thieken, Annegret T1 - The presence of moral hazard regarding flood insurance and German private businesses JF - Natural hazards : journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards N2 - There is a movement towards the concepts of integrated flood risk management and governance. In these concepts, each stakeholder prone to flooding is tasked with actively limiting flood impacts. Currently, relatively more research has focused upon the adaptation of private households and not on private businesses operating in flood-prone areas. This paper offers an extension of this literature on business-level flood adaptation by exploring the potential presence of moral hazard. The analyses are based on survey data collected in the aftermath of six floods across Germany between 2002 and 2013 to provide a first indication of the presence of moral hazard in private businesses. Moral hazard is where increased insurance coverage results in policyholders preparing less, increasing the risk they face, a counterproductive outcome. We present an initial study of moral hazard occurring through three channels: the performance of emergency measures during a flood, changes in precautionary behavior employed before a given flood occurred, and changes in the intention to employ additional precautionary measures after a flood. We find, much like for private households, no strong indication that moral hazard is present regarding past adaptation. However, there is a potential avenue after 2005 for insurance coverage to lower businesses' intentions to employ more adaptation measures after a flood. This has significant policy relevance such as opportunities for strengthening the link between insurance and risk reduction measures and boosting insurance coverage against flooding in general. KW - Flooding KW - Risk reduction KW - Private businesses KW - Insurance KW - Moral hazard KW - Company Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-022-05227-9 SN - 0921-030X SN - 1573-0840 VL - 112 IS - 2 SP - 1295 EP - 1319 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hudson, Paul A1 - Botzen, W. J. Wouter A1 - Poussin, Jennifer A1 - Aerts, Jeroen C. J. H. T1 - Impacts of flooding and flood preparedness on subjective well-being BT - a monetisation of the tangible and intangible impacts JF - Journal of Happiness Studies N2 - Flood disasters severely impact human subjective well-being (SWB). Nevertheless, few studies have examined the influence of flood events on individual well-being and how such impacts may be limited by flood protection measures. This study estimates the long term impacts on individual subjective well-being of flood experiences, individual subjective flood risk perceptions, and household flood preparedness decisions. These effects are monetised and placed in context through a comparison with impacts of other adverse events on well-being. We collected data from households in flood-prone areas in France. The results indicate that experiencing a flood has a large negative impact on subjective well-being that is incompletely attenuated over time. Moreover, individuals do not need to be directly affected by floods to suffer SWB losses since subjective well-being is lower for those who expect their flood risk to increase or who have seen a neighbour being flooded. Floodplain inhabitants who prepared for flooding by elevating their home have a higher subjective well-being. A monetisation of the aforementioned well-being impacts shows that a flood requires Euro150,000 in immediate compensation to attenuate SWB losses. The decomposition of the monetised impacts of flood experience into tangible losses and intangible effects on SWB shows that intangible effects are about twice as large as the tangible direct monetary flood losses. Investments in flood protection infrastructure may be under funded if the intangible SWB benefits of flood protection are not taken into account. KW - Flooding KW - Subjective well-being KW - Intangible losses KW - Tangible losses KW - Climate change KW - Adaptation KW - Climate change adaptation Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9916-4 SN - 1389-4978 SN - 1573-7780 VL - 20 IS - 2 SP - 665 EP - 682 PB - Springer Science CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hundecha, Yeshewatesfa A1 - Sunyer, Maria A. A1 - Lawrence, Deborah A1 - Madsen, Henrik A1 - Willems, Patrick A1 - Bürger, Gerd A1 - Kriauciuniene, Jurate A1 - Loukas, Athanasios A1 - Martinkova, Marta A1 - Osuch, Marzena A1 - Vasiliades, Lampros A1 - von Christierson, Birgitte A1 - Vormoor, Klaus Josef A1 - Yuecel, Ismail T1 - Inter-comparison of statistical downscaling methods for projection of extreme flow indices across Europe JF - Journal of hydrology N2 - The effect of methods of statistical downscaling of daily precipitation on changes in extreme flow indices under a plausible future climate change scenario was investigated in 11 catchments selected from 9 countries in different parts of Europe. The catchments vary from 67 to 6171 km(2) in size and cover different climate zones. 15 regional climate model outputs and 8 different statistical downscaling methods, which are broadly categorized as change factor and bias correction based methods, were used for the comparative analyses. Different hydrological models were implemented in different catchments to simulate daily runoff. A set of flood indices were derived from daily flows and their changes have been evaluated by comparing their values derived from simulations corresponding to the current and future climate. Most of the implemented downscaling methods project an increase in the extreme flow indices in most of the catchments. The catchments where the extremes are expected to increase have a rainfall dominated flood regime. In these catchments, the downscaling methods also project an increase in the extreme precipitation in the seasons when the extreme flows occur. In catchments where the flooding is mainly caused by spring/summer snowmelt, the downscaling methods project a decrease in the extreme flows in three of the four catchments considered. A major portion of the variability in the projected changes in the extreme flow indices is attributable to the variability of the climate model ensemble, although the statistical downscaling methods contribute 35-60% of the total variance. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Flooding KW - Statistical downscaling KW - Regional climate models KW - Climate change KW - Europe Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.08.033 SN - 0022-1694 SN - 1879-2707 VL - 541 SP - 1273 EP - 1286 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Merz, Bruno A1 - Viet Dung Nguyen, A1 - Vorogushyn, Sergiy T1 - Temporal clustering of floods in Germany: Do flood-rich and flood-poor periods exist? JF - Journal of hydrology N2 - The repeated occurrence of exceptional floods within a few years, such as the Rhine floods in 1993 and 1995 and the Elbe and Danube floods in 2002 and 2013, suggests that floods in Central Europe may be organized in flood-rich and flood-poor periods. This hypothesis is studied by testing the significance of temporal clustering in flood occurrence (peak-over-threshold) time series for 68 catchments across Germany for the period 1932-2005. To assess the robustness of the results, different methods are used: Firstly, the index of dispersion, which quantifies the departure from a homogeneous Poisson process, is investigated. Further, the time-variation of the flood occurrence rate is derived by non-parametric kernel implementation and the significance of clustering is evaluated via parametric and non-parametric tests. Although the methods give consistent overall results, the specific results differ considerably. Hence, we recommend applying different methods when investigating flood clustering. For flood estimation and risk management, it is of relevance to understand whether clustering changes with flood severity and time scale. To this end, clustering is assessed for different thresholds and time scales. It is found that the majority of catchments show temporal clustering at the 5% significance level for low thresholds and time scales of one to a few years. However, clustering decreases substantially with increasing threshold and time scale. We hypothesize that flood clustering in Germany is mainly caused by catchment memory effects along with intra- to inter-annual climate variability, and that decadal climate variability plays a minor role. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Climate variability KW - Flooding KW - Temporal clustering KW - Index of dispersion KW - Kernel occurrence rate Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.07.041 SN - 0022-1694 SN - 1879-2707 VL - 541 SP - 824 EP - 838 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -