UNLABELLED Flooding is the most common and damaging of all natural disasters in the United States, and was a factor in almost all declared disasters in U.S. HISTORY Direct flood losses in the U.S. in 2011 totaled $8.41 billion and flood damage has also been on the rise globally over the past century. The National Flood Insurance Program paid out more than $38 billion in claims since its incep...

How is knowledge about future climate change operationalized in governance of the present? This paper addresses this question by examining efforts to repurpose US National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for adaptation. Policymakers and officials initially imagined challenge be principally a technical one accounting uncertainty risk assessments insurance tools. But conduct outcome their reflecte...

Noelwah R. Netusil, Stanley H. Cohn Professor of Economics Department Economics, Reed College, Portland, Oregon; netusil{at}reed.edu

Globally, economic losses from flooding exceeded $19 billion in 2012, and are rising rapidly. Hence, there is an increasing need for global-scale flood risk assessments, also within the context of integrated global assessments. We have developed and validated a model cascade for producing global flood risk maps, based on numerous flood return-periods. Validation results indicate that the model ...

A number of hedonic property pricing studies of flood risk indicate that properties within a designated higher flood risk zone sell for a lower price than an equivalent property outside of it. However, often the homes most at flood risk are also the most desirable in terms of their proximity to the water, and this concurrent existence of positive water-related amenities and negative flood risk ...

Reforms are required to maintain a healthy and robust flood insurance market under future climate conditions for the United States. Therefore, policymakers should implement premiums that reflect risk incentivize household-level reduction, complemented with regional adaptation investments.