The MOVIDA Project to Support the Update of Flood Risk Maps in the Po River District: methodology for flood damage assessment

Effective planning of flood risk mitigation strategies requires to assess costs and benefits of alternatives of intervention, in terms of required investments and impacts avoided. For this reason, the European Commission asks Member States to develop and periodically update flood hazard and risk maps, to be used at the basis of Flood Risk Management Plans. Flood damage assessment and mapping is a critical step in such a process, due to the lack of consolidated practice both in the literature and the technical domains; this results in the present availability of mostly qualitative damage maps, with limited usability for flood risk management. By allowing scientists and practitioners working together, the MOVIDA project developed a newly procedure, embracing state of art damage models and knowledge on damage mechanisms, for an analytical assessment and mapping of flood damage in the Italian territory, with specific reference to the Po River District (North of Italy). The procedure was specifically conceived to support cos-benefits or multi-criteria analyses of flood risk mitigation measures, focusing on all categories of exposed assets and suppling, when achievable, a monetary evaluation of flood damage. The procedure was successfully implemented in the areas of potentially significant flood risk (APSFRs) in the district; results represent a significant improvement with respect to presently available damage maps, both in terms of assets considered and information supplied.