Findings from W.B.M. Ten Brinke et al in Disaster Risk Reduction Reported (Social disruption by flooding, a European perspective)

Politics & Government Week

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Politics & Government Week -- Investigators discuss new findings in Disaster Risk Reduction. According to news originating from Utrecht, Netherlands, by VerticalNews correspondents, research stated, "The Dutch National Risk Assessment (NRA) is a methodology to assess the impact and likelihood of all possible threats and hazards that might hit the Netherlands, including a large-scale flood. This methodology addresses all the physical and social aspects that determine social disruption."

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research, "The NRA has been applied to six European floods in Central and Western Europe. The results show that the NRA impact score for a flooding scenario can be interpreted as a measure for social disruption. Some comments can be made, however. The all hazards approach of the NRA is designed as a robust instrument that enables covering a wide array of threats and disasters. As a result, the NRA in its 'original' form offers little room for detailed differences in the consequences of different flooding scenarios. Tailor-made adjustments to the NRA are needed to insure that, for instance, differences in the number of casualties for different floods do not get lost in the bandwidth of the impact criteria. Socio-psychological factors significantly mark the impact of flooding. This offers opportunities to steer on avoiding or restricting social disruption by flooding by putting an adequate flood risk and crisis communication in place. The floods in Central Europe in 2002 and 2013 more or less present the lower and upper bounds of the impacts of recent large-scale river floods in Central and Western Europe."

According to the news editors, the research concluded: "Compared with this bandwidth, the impact of a scenario of a worst-case river flood in the Netherlands is not unusual in a European context."

For more information on this research see: Social disruption by flooding, a European perspective. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2017;21():312-322. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction can be contacted at: Elsevier Science Bv, PO Box 211, 1000 Ae Amsterdam, Netherlands. (Elsevier - www.elsevier.com; International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction - www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-of-disaster-risk-reduction/)

The news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained from W.B.M. Ten Brinke, Center Climate Adaptat, Utrecht, Netherlands. Additional authors for this research include J. Knoop, H. Muilwijk and W. Ligtvoet.