Welcome to floodam.cba
floodam.cba is an R library for estimating indicators for cost-benefit analysis (CBA) applied to flood management policies.
This library has been developed within the French working group “GT AMC” which aims at developing methodologies for the economic appraisal of flood management policies. In this context, the development of floodam.cba has received the support of the French Ministry in charge of the Environment.
What floodam.cba can do
floodam.cba is based on :
- a synthetic description of the situation of exposure of a territory to floods
- a description of the impact of projects on this situation.
Specifically, floodam.cba needs:
-
flood exposure situation
- description of how the different stakes are impacted by the flood
for a set of scenarios, which can be done in two ways:
- by monetarized damages
- by other quantitative metrics (number of assets, surface area of assets, etc.)
- description of the flood scenarios, mainly :
- an indicator of their rarity through return periods
- and, if relevant, an indicator of the rarity of the associated sub-scenarios (e.g. if a collective intrastructure may fail)
- description of how the different stakes are impacted by the flood
for a set of scenarios, which can be done in two ways:
-
project impacts :
- effects of projects, mainly how they change the flood exposure situation of the territory, as well as other possible impacts (environment costs for instance)
- implementation conditions (short-term costs, long-term costs, implementation schedule).
From this information, floodam.cba can calculate the following indicators:
- average annual damage (AAD) and equivalents for other metrics for a given situation
- average annual damage avoided (AAD) and equivalents for other metrics between two given situations.
- chronicle of monetary an non monetary impacts of projects
- net present value (NPV) of projects supplemented by other efficiency
indicators such as
- the ratio of benefit divided by cost
- the minimum length of time horizon for the project to be efficient (if applicable)
- project cost-effectiveness indicators such as
- number of residents avoided in floodplain divided by cost
- number of employees avoided in floodplain divided by cost.
What floodam.cba cannot do
floodam.cba cannot (and is not intended to) :
- calculate the return period of flooding scenarios
- calculate the hydraulic impacts of projects
- calculate damages from the intersection of hydraulic modeling, land use modeling and damage functions. This is what floodam.spatial does.
floodam.cba cannot (but should at some point be able to) :
- calculate the uncertainty of the estimated indicators
- perform a sensitivity analysis of the estimated indicators
- calculate the indicators from a “continuous” perspective.