Adaptive risk management strategies for governments under future climate and socioeconomic change: An application to riverine flood risk at the global level

Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler*, Thomas Schinko, Andries Hof, Philip J. Ward

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Climate-related disaster risks pose a threat to sustainable development today and in the future. Major global agendas, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals, address ways of developing effective management strategies for tackling such risks. Risk management is increasingly focusing on low probability but high impact events, next to the more traditional attention on expected losses. We focus on urban riverine flood risk across 200 countries for today, 2030, and 2080, and develop a risk-threshold approach for identifying whether a country is exposed to risk of extreme events and, if so, when and how much. Furthermore, we apply a risk-layer approach to delineate the kinds of risk reduction or financing instruments that may be needed to manage emerging risks at the national level. Based on these country-level results, we analyze the macroeconomic consequences of setting up a global fund as one international option for coping with floods today and in the future. An additional macroeconomic analysis of different funding schemes for capitalizing the global fund provides insights into linking national risk management efforts with global efforts to manage risks. The global fund could be capitalized according to different equality principles. Our results provide an argument for an equity-based capitalization principle rather than a risk-based one, as the former makes damages at the local level a global responsibility.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)10-20
Number of pages11
JournalEnvironmental Science and Policy
Volume125
Early online date27 Aug 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We acknowledge funding for this research by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 642147 ( 'CD-LINKS' project ) and grant agreement no. 776479 ( 'COACCH' project ). Additionally, PJ.W was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in the form of a VIDI grant (grant no. 016.161.324 ).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors

Keywords

  • Adaptive risk management
  • Capitalization regimes
  • Fiscal risk
  • Flooding
  • Global fund
  • Risk layering

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