Flood risk management for policymaking and governance: Assessing the impact on critical water infrastructures

Abstract Policymakers need to make decisions to increase the resilience of critical water infrastructures. Some of these are already affected by increased flooding because of climate change, and infrastructures will be increasingly affected, as predictions are grim. In this context, policymakers do not have sufficient quantitative tools to perform cost-benefit analyses of the various mitigation and adaptation decisions. For this reason, a more complete tool than those proposed so far is necessary, one that makes it possible to estimate the direct economic losses caused by floods of critical water infrastructures and the indirect economic losses caused by the interruption of water infrastructures’ services to industry.