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Decision Support on Flood Management in Complex Urban Settings. Is Risk Assessment the Right Approach or Do We Need Decision Heuristics?

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Book cover Urban Transformations

Part of the book series: Future City ((FUCI,volume 10))

Abstract

Natural hazards, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, avalanches, etc., have severe societal impacts. This is not only, but in particular, the case in cities, where people and assets concentrate, and hence, the values at risk and potential damages accumulate (Rink et al. 2015). As a consequence of urban growth and climate change, these risks are likely to increase in many cities in the future, confronting urban decision makers with the question of whether their current portfolio of risk management options is sufficient or if more radical urban transformations are necessary to mitigate the societal impacts of natural hazards.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Admittedly, empirical evidence from the UK has shown that, at the national level, costs of flood protection could also increase with an even higher declining rate than the benefits (Pearce and Smale 2005). In this case, the NPV of flood protection projects increases as investments increase.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Pauline Brémond, Katrin Erdlenbruch, Frédéric Grelot, Reimund Schwarze and Oliver Gebhardt for discussing the topic with me and/or comments on earlier versions. The work on this topic was supported by the Prix Gay-Lussac Humboldt, funded by the French Ministry for Higher Education and Research, in conjunction with the Académie des Sciences, Institut de France.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Volker Meyer

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  1. Volker Meyer
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Correspondence to Volker Meyer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urban and Environment Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Sigrun Kabisch

  2. Department of Urban and Environment Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Florian Koch

  3. Department of Economics, Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Erik Gawel

  4. Department of Urban and Environment Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Annegret Haase

  5. Department of Community Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research-UFZ, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Sonja Knapp

  6. Department of Urban and Environment Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Kerstin Krellenberg

  7. Centre for Environmental Biotechnology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Jaime Nivala

  8. Centre for Environmental Biotechnology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Andreas Zehnsdorf

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Meyer, V. (2018). Decision Support on Flood Management in Complex Urban Settings. Is Risk Assessment the Right Approach or Do We Need Decision Heuristics?. In: Kabisch, S., et al. Urban Transformations. Future City, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59324-1_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59324-1_20

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