Computational decision analysis for flood risk management in an uncertain future

Flood risk management is in many countries a major expense, and while the returns on this investment, in terms of risk reduction, are also high, the process of developing and choosing between management options is of critical importance. New sources of data and the falling cost of computation have made possible new approaches to options appraisal. The state of the art has a number of limitations, however. We present a comprehensive but parsimonious framework for computational decision analysis in flood risk management that addresses these issues. At its core is a simple but flexible model of change on the decadal time scale of typical option appraisals, including the management interventions that are the subject of decision along with influences, such as climate change, that are independent of the processes of flood risk management. A fully integrated performance model is developed, estimating both costs and benefits. Uncertainty analysis can thereby be applied to performance metrics of direct interest to stakeholders. We illustrate the framework with an implementation for a hypothetical flood risk management decision. We discuss possible variants of the framework that could be extended to fields other than flood risk management.