Storm-induced risk assessment: evaluation of two tools at the regional and hotspot scale

Abstract

Coastal zones are under increasing risk as coastal hazards increase due to climate change and the consequences of these also increase due to on-going economic development. To effectively deal with this increased risk requires the development of validated tools to identify coastal areas of higher risk and to evaluate the effectiveness of disaster risk reduction (DRR) measures. This paper analyses the performance in the application of two tools which have been developed in the RISC-KIT project: the regional Coastal Risk Assessment Framework (CRAF) and a hotspot early warning system coupled with a decision support system (EWS/DSS). The paper discusses the main achievements of the tools as well as improvements needed to support their further use by the coastal community. The CRAF, a tool to identify and rank hotspots of coastal risk at the regional scale, provides useful results for coastal managers and stakeholders. A change over time of the hotspots location and ranking can be analysed as a function of changes on coastal occupation or climate change. This tool is highly dependent on the quality of available information and a major constraint to its application is the relatively poor availability and accessibility of high-quality data, particularly in respect to social-economic indicators, and to lesser extent the physical environment. The EWS/DSS can be used as a warning system to predict potential impacts or to test the effectiveness of risk reduction measures at a given hotspot. This tool provides high resolution results, but needs validation against impact data, which are still scarce. The EWS/DSS tool can be improved by enhancing the vulnerability relationships and detailing the receptors in each area (increasing the detail, but also model simulations). The developed EWS/DSS can be adapted and extended to include a greater range of conditions (including climate change), receptors, hazards and impacts, enhancing disaster preparedness for effective risk reduction for further events or morphological conditions. Despite these concerns, the tools assessed in this paper proved to be valuable instruments for coastal management and risk reduction that can be adopted in a wide range of coastal areas.