Flood insurance value of land use systems and its application in spatial planning

Floods with major impacts on insurance companies occur regularly in significant parts of Flanders and are expected to occur more frequently due to climate change and soil sealing. Through their hydrological traits and position along flow paths, certain land use systems (LUS) have a larger capacity to reduce the frequency, extent, depth and duration of floods downstream. The riskreducing capacity of LUS can be interpreted as a flood insurance value (IV), which may be lost or enhanced through land use change. This IV of upstream LUS is often neglected in spatial planning leading to flood prone landscapes, nor is it accounted for in business models of insurance companies. The strategic objectives of this project are to foster flood aware spatial planning and new flood insurance business models which take into account the (lack of) resilience of upstream LUS. First, the hypothesis that the hydrological characteristics and spatial distribution of upstream LUS impact the characteristics of floods downstream will be empirically assessed in a quantitative and spatially explicit manner. This relation will be modelled with tools to evaluate ‘Where if’-scenarios. The models will then be combined with optimization algorithms and integrated in a planning support system which has the capacity to solve spatially explicit optimization problems. Finally, a procedure will be proposed and evaluated to calculate the flood IV (in €) of every actual and potential LUS within any river catchment.