Flood Footprint Assessment: A Multiregional Case of 2009 Central European Floods.

Hydrometeorological phenomena have increased in intensity and frequency in last decades, with Europe as one of the most affected areas. This accounts for considerable economic losses in the region. Regional adaptation strategies for costs minimization require a comprehensive assessment of the disasters' economic impacts at a multiple-region scale. This article adapts the flood footprint method for multiple-region assessment of total economic impact and applies it to the 2009 Central European Floods event. The flood footprint is an impact accounting framework based on the input-output methodology to economically assess the physical damage (direct) and production shortfalls (indirect) within a region and wider economic networks, caused by a climate disaster. Here, the model is extended through the capital matrix, to enable diverse recovery strategies. According to the results, indirect losses represent a considerable proportion of the total costs of a natural disaster, and most of them occur in nonhighly directly impacted industries. For the 2009 Central European Floods, the indirect losses represent 65% out of total, and 70% of it comes from four industries: business services, manufacture general, construction, and commerce. Additionally, results show that more industrialized economies would suffer more indirect losses than less-industrialized ones, in spite of being less vulnerable to direct shocks. This may link to their specific economic structures of high capital-intensity and strong interindustrial linkages.

Vulnerability and Resilience in the Caribbean Island States; the Role of Connectivity.

It is well-known that small states, because of their size, tend to be less endowed with natural resources than big ones. This makes small states vulnerable and raises the question if specific policies can be implemented to offset the drawbacks of their small size and to increase resilience. We address this question in this paper, thereby focusing on the role of connectivity - between states, organisations, parties, or otherwise - in understanding a country's vulnerability and resilience. Here 'policies' are interpreted as 'institutions' in the sense of Douglass C. North (1990), i.e. as 'humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction'. We focus on the Caribbean area, which is characterised by a wide variety of small states, each with its own set of rules and regulations. Within this area, we concentrate on the relationship between three Dutch Caribbean islands, i.e., Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten, on the one hand, and the Netherlands, the former colonizer, on the other hand. As a first step we have measured the economic vulnerability and resilience of 17 Caribbean island states, both dependent and independent, employing the theoretical framework proposed by Lino Briguglio. The outcomes show that the three Dutch island states are performing comparatively well, although there are individual differences. We provide a first effort to explain this outcome in terms of the continuing interest of the three island states to keep their ties to the former colonizer viable. Here the presence of 'systemic interest' as shown by the stakeholders appears to be a most important variable. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11067-021-09533-w.

Assessing the economic impacts of IT service shutdown during the York flood of 2015 in the UK.

In this paper we focus on the 'Christmas' flood in York (UK), 2015. The case is special in the sense that little infrastructure was lost or damaged, while a single industry (IT services) was completely knocked out for a limited time. Due to these characteristics, the standard modelling techniques are no longer appropriate. An alternative option is provided by the Hypothetical Extraction Method, or HEM. However, there are restrictions in using the HEM, one being that no realistic substitutes exist for inputs from industries that were affected. In this paper we discuss these restrictions and show that the HEM performs well in the York flood case. In the empirical part of this paper we show that a three-day shutdown of the IT services caused a £3.24 m to £4.23 m loss in York, which is equivalent to 10% of the three days' average GVA (Gross Value Added) of York city. The services sector (excluding IT services) sustained the greatest loss at £0.80 m, where the business support industry which was predominantly hit. This study is the first to apply a HEM in this type of flood on a daily basis.