Flood mitigation measures implemented by private households have become an important component of contemporary integrated flood risk management in Germany and many other countries. Despite the growing responsibility of private households to contribute to flood damage reduction by means of private flood mitigation measures, knowledge on the long-term development of such measures, which indicates...

A novel multi-objective simulation-optimization (S-O) framework for flood mitigation in a river-reservoir system with multiple reservoirs and control points is proposed. Different combinations of objectives regarding flood mitigation in one or more of the reservoirs and/or one or more of the control points can be specified within the framework, namely, (1) maximizing the flood releases from the...

Of all natural disasters, flooding causes the greatest amount of economic and social damage. The United States' Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) uses a number of hazard mitigation grant programmes for flood victims, including mitigation offers to relocate permanently repetitive flood loss victims. This study examines factors that help to explain the degree of difficulty repetitive flo...

Among various natural disasters floods make the largest impact in terms of number of casualties, people affected and property lost. Flood data during the past 30 years show that flood events that cause significant impacts have increased at a steady rate. Available data suggest that this increase could be attributed to increasing population and exposure, increasing property values located in vul...

In the United States, mitigating the adverse impacts of flooding has increasingly become the responsibility of local decision-makers. Despite the importance of understanding how and why flood mitigation techniques are implemented at the local level, few large-scale, empirical studies have been conducted in recent years. Our study examines the current status and extensiveness of flood mitigation...

In the United States, mitigating the adverse impacts of flooding has increasingly become the responsibility of local decision makers. Despite the importance of understanding why flood mitigation techniques are implemented at the local level, few empirical studies have been conducted over the last decade. Our study addresses this lack of research by examining the factors influencing local commun...

In March 2014, Congress passed legislation to halt discounted flood insurance premiums from increasing to full-risk levels. The rate hike was authorized two years earlier by the Biggert-Waters Act to address the National Flood Insurance Program’s structurally induced $24 billion debt. The recent developments highlight the tension between risk-based premium and affordability of flood insurance f...

The employment of damage mitigation measures by individuals is an important component of integrated flood risk management. In order to promote efficient damage mitigation measures, accurate estimates of their damage mitigation potential are required. That is, for correctly assessing the damage mitigation measures’ effectiveness from survey data, one needs to control for sources of bias. A biase...

A basic proposition of agency theory is that output-based performance incentives encourage greater effort. However, studies find that incentive schemes can distort effort if rewards for performance are discrete or nonlinear. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Community Rating System (CRS) is a flood mitigation program with a nonlinear incentive design. Under this program, localiti...

Green infrastructure approaches have attracted increased attention from local governments as a way to lower flood risk and provide an array of other environmental services. The peer-reviewed literature, however, offers few estimates of the economic impacts of such approaches at the watershed scale. We estimate the avoided flood damages and the costs of preventing development of floodplain parce...