Justice and flood risk management: reflecting on different approaches to distribute and allocate flood risk management in Europe

Abstract

This paper compares the inherent notions of justice in four different approaches to flood risk management in Europe. As protection against flood risks becomes increasingly difficult, dilemmas of justice emerge: some benefits from flood protection measures whereas others loose. Decisions on whom to protect differentiate between upstream and downstream or left and right side of a river. This raises a central but barely discussed conflict: what (or rather who) should be protected against inundations? This question deals in essence with justice. Justice concerns questions over fairness in the allocation of resources, capital and wealth across different members of society. There are different and contradicting concepts of justice, which differ in interpretations of fair resource allocation and distributions. 'What's the right thing to protect' is thus a question of concepts of justice. This contribution is not an attempt to answer this fundamental question, but it offers a debate on how different concepts of justice provide different answers. These answers will then be related to flood risk management approaches in England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria.

Allocation of risk and benefits—distributional justices in mountain hazard management

“…Since the beginning of 2000s, the Austrian natural hazard funding policy is following a mixture of egalitarianism and utilitarianism social justices' direction (see also Thaler and Hartmann 2016). The national government introduced to prioritise the investment based on cost-benefit analysis, where the highest benefit-cost ratio gets implemented first (Sinabell and Url 2007;BMLFUW 2009).…”

“…Debates on social justices and equity in managing natural hazards and risk became more prominent in the past 10 years (Fielding and Burningham 2005;Colton 2007;Johnson et al 2007;Walker and Burningham 2011;Thaler and Hartmann 2016). In particular, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, various publications addressed the question about social and spatial inequality with the aim to understand the impact of natural disasters on low-income households (such as Dixon and Ramutsindela 2006;Elliott and Pais 2006;Bullard and Warf 2009;Walker and Burningham 2011).…”

Micro-sized enterprises: vulnerability to flash floods

“…The vulnerability model presented here is an essential step for designing and implementing effective and efficient flood risk mitigation strategies (Holub et al 2012;Thaler and Hartmann 2016;Thaler et al 2016). The results as well as the comparisons with other models provide valuable information in the ongoing discussion on vulnerability and highlight the importance of relatively small study areas with local and heterogenic characteristics in order to provide valuable insights for the development of a sophisticated panEuropean flood damage modelling approach (Jongman et al 2012).…”

What does nature have to do with it? Reconsidering distinctions in international disaster response frameworks in the Danube basin

“…Though this can be challenging, there is a growing literature concerning the development of the technical and policy tools necessary (Kappes et al, 2012;Holub and Fuchs, 2009) and how to address fairness considerations (Thaler and Hartmann, 2016). There are multiple examples of more holistic and comprehensive approaches being used in the EU countries (Grieving et al, 2012;.…”