Innovation Lab 2 - NATURANCE

Natural flood risk management

Methods to quantify flood risk reduction and co-benefits of nature-based solutions in the Netherlands

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Summary

This Innovation Lab explored how to improve the current methods to quantify flood risk reduction potential and wider co-benefits of NbS in the Netherlands. The Lab was motivated by the increasing urgency of improving current flood-risk management policies following the 2021 European floods.

The first session served as an introduction to the Lab, the second session focused on improving the current flood-risk modelling and the last one focused on co-benefits (and disbenefits) of NbS. The second session was mainly attended by representatives from the insurance sector and modellers, whereas the final session was targeted at local stakeholders and public-sector decision-makers. The outcomes of the Lab fed directly into the new methods.

Through this Lab, modellers improved their understanding of the challenges and interests of the relevant stakeholders, in order to provide better data for decision making and mainstreaming investment in NbS.

Audiences

Environmental experts

Insurance professionals

Authorities

Outcomes

The Lab allowed us to discuss our new object-based model with insurers, which highlighted how important the structure of the insurance market is to expect NbS to have an impact on premiums and to incentivise insurers to invest in NbS;

For instance, in the Netherlands, the one-year underwriting contract is identified as a key barrier, since customers could change their provider after one year;

In the third session, we discussed the attributes for a Limburg (Netherlands) choice experiment. Due to the feedback from the water board and the municipality, we edited the attributes so it explicitly captures land-use trade-offs such as loss of agricultural land, which was identified as a key challenge.

Additional Materials

Episodes 4, 7 and 8 of the NATURANCE Talks podcast;

Improved methods for the assessment of risk reduction achieved by NBS for insurance and for assessing co-benefits to society;

Recommendations for integrating NbS in insurance schemes based on the synthesized and improved catastrophe models and other methods and empirical evidence base.

Policy and finance brief: Risk transfer and reduction through Nature-based Solutions;

Policy and finance brief: Assessing flood risk in the context of nature-based solutions.

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