TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bubeck, Philip
A1  - Thieken, Annegret
T1  - What helps people recover from floods?
BT  - insights from a survey among flood-affected residents in German
JF  - Regional environmental change
N2  - The number of people exposed to natural hazards has grown steadily over recent decades, mainly due to increasing exposure in hazard-prone areas. In the future, climate change could further enhance this trend. Still, empirical and comprehensive insights into individual recovery from natural hazards are largely lacking, hampering efforts to increase societal resilience. Drawing from a sample of 710 residents affected by flooding across Germany in June 2013, we empirically explore a wide range of variables possibly influencing self-reported recovery, including flood-event characteristics, the circumstances of the recovery process, socio-economic characteristics, and psychological factors, using multivariate statistics. We found that the amount of damage and other flood-event characteristics such as inundation depth are less important than socio-economic characteristics (e.g., sex or health status) and psychological factors (e.g., risk aversion and emotions). Our results indicate that uniform recovery efforts focusing on areas that were the most affected in terms of physical damage are insufficient to account for the heterogeneity in individual recovery results. To increase societal resilience, aid and recovery efforts should better address the long-term psychological effects of floods.
KW  - Floods
KW  - Resilience
KW  - Recovery
KW  - Natural hazards
KW  - Climate change
KW  - Adaptation
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-017-1200-y
SN  - 1436-3798
SN  - 1436-378X
VL  - 18
IS  - 1
SP  - 287
EP  - 296
PB  - Springer
CY  - Heidelberg
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Thieken, Annegret
T1  - Contributions of flood insurance toeEnhance resilience-findings from Germany
BT  - Findings from Germany
JF  - Urban Disaster Resilience and Security
N2  - In 2002, a severe flood caused financial losses of EUR 11.6 billion in Germany and triggered many changes in flood risk management. This chapter focuses on flood insurance, which is a voluntary supplementary insurance in Germany: it is explored how flood insurance has contributed to enhance resilience of flood-prone residents. The analyses are based on empirical data collected by post-event surveys in the federal states of Saxony and Bavaria and refer to the three pillars upon which the concept of flood resilience usually builds in the natural hazards context: recovery, adaptive capacity and resistance. Overall, the penetration of flood insurance has increased since 2002 and there is strong empirical evidence that losses of insured residents are more often and better compensated than those of uninsured despite the provision of governmental financial disaster assistance after big floods. This facilitation of recovery is, however, not the only contribution to flood resilience. Insured residents tend to invest more in further flood mitigation measures at their properties than uninsured. Obviously, flood insurance is embedded in a complex safety strategy of property owners that needs more investigation in order to be addressed more effectively in risk communication and integrated risk management strategies.
KW  - Flood losses
KW  - Recovery
KW  - Climate change adaptation Saxony
KW  - Bavaria
Y1  - 2017
SN  - 978-3-319-68606-6
SN  - 978-3-319-68605-9
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68606-6_9
SN  - 2365-757X
SP  - 129
EP  - 144
PB  - Springer
CY  - Cham
ER  -