Integrated assessment of short-term direct and indirect economic flood impacts including uncertainty quantification

PLoS One. 2019 Apr 4;14(4):e0212932. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212932. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Understanding and quantifying total economic impacts of flood events is essential for flood risk management and adaptation planning. Yet, detailed estimations of joint direct and indirect flood-induced economic impacts are rare. In this study an innovative modeling procedure for the joint assessment of short-term direct and indirect economic flood impacts is introduced. The procedure is applied to 19 economic sectors in eight federal states of Germany after the flood events in 2013. The assessment of the direct economic impacts is object-based and considers uncertainties associated with the hazard, the exposed objects and their vulnerability. The direct economic impacts are then coupled to a supply-side Input-Output-Model to estimate the indirect economic impacts. The procedure provides distributions of direct and indirect economic impacts which capture the associated uncertainties. The distributions of the direct economic impacts in the federal states are plausible when compared to reported values. The ratio between indirect and direct economic impacts shows that the sectors Manufacturing, Financial and Insurance activities suffered the most from indirect economic impacts. These ratios also indicate that indirect economic impacts can be almost as high as direct economic impacts. They differ strongly between the economic sectors indicating that the application of a single factor as a proxy for the indirect impacts of all economic sectors is not appropriate.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Climate Change / economics*
  • Floods / economics*
  • Floods / prevention & control
  • Germany
  • Humans
  • Insurance / economics
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Risk Management
  • Uncertainty

Grants and funding

TS and KV received funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; http://www.dfg.de/). The grant number is GRK 2043/1. TS received funding from the Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung PIK (https://www.pik-potsdam.de/) during the stay at International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) for the Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.