Measuring the social impacts of coastal flooding: a Danish example

Living with the risk or impact of coastal flooding can have serious consequences. However, social impacts, reflecting how people are affected, are generally not very well represented in coastal flood risk assessments. Instead, such analyses usually focus on factors that can be quantified in market values, implying that associated cost-benefit analyses will mainly highlight sectors suffering large monetary losses. In this paper, we argue for an approach to damage cost assessments of coastal flooding that - in addition to considering physical assets - includes equity and the impacts on people’s freedoms to fulfil their preferences. The approach suggests additional indicators representing equity and wellbeing as a supplement to conventional cost-benefit analyses for coastal flooding. We apply the approach to three flood-prone Danish coastal cities. Using a damage cost model and a detailed income dataset, we estimate the equity weighted damage costs. As indicators for how people are affected, we apply three different measures: hours committed to coping with flood impacts in homes, sick days, and market value loss of properties. Especially in one of the three cases, we find clear evidence that coastal flooding disproportionally affects people with incomes lower than the mean and hypothesize that here the potential social impacts could have significant consequences affecting households.