ENHANCE Project documents: deliverables, briefs and papers

The ENHANCE project ran from December 2012 to November 2016 under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement 308438). According to CORDIS, it cost EUR 7,687,123 in total, of which the EU contributed EUR 5,992,084, and it was coordinated from VU University Amsterdam. Over four years its 24 partners produced a long trail of paper: formal reports owed to the European Commission, working papers and policy briefs aimed at officials, a newsletter, a final book and a set of journal articles.

The library below groups that output into four kinds, because they were written for different readers and carry different weight. A deliverable is a contractual report; it records what a work package did, and quality varies. A policy brief is short and argued. A journal paper has been through peer review. The newsletters are the project talking about itself and are useful mainly for dates.

Each deliverable has its own record page with the work package, the expected delivery month and a summary of the contents. Papers in journals are linked through their DOI, which resolves to the publisher’s page.

ENHANCE deliverables

Deliverables were the reports the consortium owed the European Commission under its grant, numbered by work package: WP2 for the conceptual framework, WP3 for risk scenarios, WP5 for economic instruments, WP7 for the case studies. Their timing is given in project months, counted from month 1 in December 2012, so the years below are the expected delivery dates rather than publication stamps. Seven of them have record pages here. They are uneven reading. The early WP2 reports are inventories and method notes, written for the partners who would run the case studies. The WP5 working papers on economic and insurance instruments are the most useful to an outside reader, because they argue a position and test it against cases from the Po basin, England and Portugal.

• D2.1, Inventory of risk assessment and management tools and methods (working paper, due around August 2013). A catalogue of the risk-analysis tools, methods and data used by the partners at the start of the project, with a description of iterative risk management and a toolbox of models for the case studies. Several entries in the glossary trace back to it.
• D2.4, Conceptual guidelines for case studies (report, due around September 2013). Guidance on building multi-sector partnerships, starting from the observation that existing partnerships often fail to manage natural-hazard risk well.
• D3.1, Inventory of existing risk scenarios (report, due around September 2013). A stock-take of hazard data, spatial datasets and socio-economic projections, as raw material for future risk scenarios in each case study.
• D5.1, Review of economic instruments in risk reduction (working paper, due around April 2014). An inventory of economic instruments that support risk management, judged by their potential to create incentives, and their likely uptake in the case studies.
• D5.2, Key economic instruments for risk reduction and management for the case studies (working paper, due around February 2015). Narrows D5.1 down to the instruments relevant to each case.
• D5.3, Novel and improved insurance instruments for risk reduction (working paper, submitted 27 February 2015). How insurance can be designed to encourage risk reduction, combining theory with evidence from the Po basin, England, Chamusca in Portugal and other cases.
• D7.2, Development of MSPs (report, due around April 2014). The development of partnerships in the case studies, including those formed in the Po river basin after the 2012 earthquake and the 2003 drought.

Other deliverables of the same period were announced in January 2015 but have no record page here: D2.2 on a resilience framework, D2.3 on governance indicators for partnerships, D4.1 on risk perception and risk cultures in Europe, and D6.1 on policy instruments and indicators for interaction between partnerships and policy. D4.1 matters for the Wadden Sea case study, which compared Dutch and German risk cultures.

Policy briefs and working papers

Alongside the formal reports, ENHANCE partners wrote shorter pieces aimed at policymakers and timed to particular debates: the Commission’s 2013 Green Paper on disaster insurance, the Sendai conference of March 2015 and the follow-up workshops on insurance and climate adaptation in 2016. These are where the project took positions. They are also the documents most often cited outside it, because a two-page brief travels further than a hundred-page report. The list is ordered by date.

• Response to the Green Paper on the insurance of natural and man-made disasters (October 2013). The consortium’s formal answer to the Commission’s consultation COM(2013) 213. It stressed the diversity of insurance systems in Europe, some with mandatory elements such as those of Spain, Belgium and France, argued that well-designed insurance can support physical risk reduction, and warned that the evidence base on economic instruments was thin. The news item on the response summarises it.
• ENHANCE leaflet (June 2014). A short introduction to the project and its case studies.
• Working Paper 01: Reflection on the current debate on how to link flood insurance and disaster risk reduction in the European Union (October 2014). The first numbered working paper, on whether and how flood insurance can be tied to prevention.
• Flood insurance in England (Surminski and Eldridge, 2014). A working paper from the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy assessing the existing arrangement and the then-proposed Flood Re, written by the lead of the London case study.
• Policy brief on natural hazard risk assessments for resilience in Europe (Botzen et al., March 2015). Released for the Sendai conference, it was mentioned in the second of the Letters from Sendai alongside examples such as an EU-wide flood risk assessment informing the EU Solidarity Fund.
• Letters from Sendai (March 2015). Nine daily letters written by ENHANCE partners from the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, later collected in one booklet with a table comparing the wording of the Sendai targets across the drafts. The collected letters are listed with links to each one.
• Unlocking the triple dividend of resilience (2015). An interim report launched at Sendai and co-written by experts from the World Bank, GFDRR and the Overseas Development Institute with ENHANCE partners Swenja Surminski (LSE) and Reinhard Mechler (IIASA). It argued that counting only avoided losses undervalues risk reduction. The report is published by GFDRR.
• Case-study booklet. A booklet presenting the ENHANCE case studies, including volcanic ash and aviation, the Po basin, the EU Solidarity Fund in Romania and the Austrian Alpine railways.
• Port of Rotterdam: a partnership for risk reduction (May 2016). A one-page case summary recommending a wider flood-risk partnership for the port, summarised in the Rotterdam news item.

A further brief on insurance instruments and disaster resilience was announced in February 2016, after the DG CLIMA workshop on insurance and climate adaptation; its final title is not recorded.

E-news alerts and the final book

Between July 2014 and March 2016 the project sent six e-news alerts, prepared by its communication partner ARCTIK. Read in order, they show what the consortium considered newsworthy at each stage: interviews with senior UN and EU figures early on, first results in late 2014, the Sendai conference in 2015. The project’s last and largest publication was its book, released at the end of October 2016 with a press release in Brussels on 10 November. All six alerts are listed on the e-news alerts page.

• Novel Multi-Sector Partnerships in Disaster Risk Management: Results of the ENHANCE project (book, October 2016). The final book presents the outcomes of the ten case studies. Its main messages: partnerships among stakeholders and a broader base of risk information are central to effective risk reduction, and ten public-private-civil society partnerships were set up or developed during the project, with particular attention to the financial sector. It records two concrete results: the Wadden Sea Forum planned to add climate change impacts to its partnership work, and the Rotterdam Port Authority, the city and the Dutch infrastructure ministry committed roughly EUR 200,000 to further climate-risk analysis of the port. See the book announcement, the book page and the press release.
• Project video (January 2015). An introductory film with examples from the case studies, announced with a round-up of the deliverables published so far in the video news item.

Risk perception questionnaires

The January 2015 e-news alert announced a risk-perception survey, and the work behind it was reported in D4.1 on risk perception and risk cultures in Europe. The survey instrument was a questionnaire put to residents in several case-study regions, and the project circulated it in more than one language: versions exist in Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Spanish readers know it as the cuestionario de percepción del riesgo, Portuguese readers as the questionário de percepção de risco, and Italian readers as the questionario sulla percezione del rischio.

A risk-perception questionnaire asks people how likely they think a hazard is, how serious the consequences would be, who they hold responsible for protection, and whether they have taken any steps themselves, such as buying cover. Comparing the answers across regions is what lets researchers say that two places with the same flood probability can behave very differently: one relies on the state, another on insurance, another on neighbours. The Wadden Sea case study is the clearest example in the library, comparing Dutch and German risk cultures. For the vocabulary, see the glossary.

Peer-reviewed papers by project authors

Several ENHANCE partners published in leading journals during the project, and the project’s articles and reports page listed most of these papers as related reading. Some concern places outside Europe, notably the New York flood studies by the coordinator’s group at VU University Amsterdam, which the project used as a reference case for European coastal cities. They are listed because they carry the arguments the project made, in a form that has passed peer review. Each DOI resolves to the publisher’s page, and some of the papers are behind a paywall.

• Aerts, Botzen, de Moel and Bowman (2013), “Cost estimates for flood resilience and protection strategies in New York City”, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1294. Compares the costs of building codes, small-scale protection, green buffers and storm-surge barriers for New York, and finds a hybrid of infrastructure protection and upgradable resilience measures cheaper. doi:10.1111/nyas.12200
• Aerts et al. (2014), “Evaluating flood resilience strategies for coastal megacities”, Science, vol. 344, pp. 473–475. Uses New York as an example of a vulnerable coastal city whose lessons apply in Europe. In an interview with the coordinator, Jeroen Aerts summarised its estimate of USD 174m a year in flood losses without new measures, and noted that 80% of households and 95% of small businesses hit by Hurricane Sandy lacked flood insurance. doi:10.1126/science.1248222
• Mechler et al. (2014), “Managing unnatural disaster risk from climate extremes”, Nature Climate Change, vol. 4. Sets out risk layering, the idea that different tools suit different layers of risk; ENHANCE partners cited it at Sendai when arguing that tools should be matched to levels of risk rather than harmonised across Europe. doi:10.1038/nclimate2137
• Jongman et al. (2014), “Increasing stress on disaster-risk finance due to large floods”, Nature Climate Change, vol. 4. Models how large, correlated river floods across Europe strain national budgets and the EU Solidarity Fund, the problem at the centre of the Romania case study. doi:10.1038/nclimate2124
• van Loenhout, Rodriguez-Llanes and Guha-Sapir (2016), “Stakeholders’ perception on national heatwave plans and their local implementation in Belgium and The Netherlands”, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 13, no. 11, article 1120. From the Université catholique de Louvain team in the heat and health case study, it found that care homes and hospitals named in national heat plans were often unaware of them. doi:10.3390/ijerph13111120

Two smaller items from the same shelf are worth knowing about but have no stable public copy: two Icelandic-language publications from 2015 and 2016 by the University of Iceland team behind the Iceland volcano case study, and a German-language report on a flood-insurance workshop held at Munich Re, listed in the project’s press review. Neither has been traced to a journal.