Understanding Flood Damage To Economic Activities In Italy From Post-Event Records

The evaluation of flood impacts to economic activities is characterized by obstacles like the paucity of available data to characterise the enterprises, the lack of high-quality data to derive new models or validate existing ones, and the high variability of activity types which hampers generalisation. This study contributes at improving knowledge about types and extent of impacts of flood events on economic activities through the analysis of empirical data, focusing on direct damage and with specific reference to the Italian context. The collaboration among different research groups allowed to collect around a thousand of observed damage records after four flood events in Italy: the inundations that occurred in the town of Lodi (Lombardia Region) in 2002, in Sardegna Region in 2013, and in the Emilia-Romagna Region caused by the Secchia (2014) and Enza (2017) Rivers. The analysis of these data lead to a better knowledge of the types of losses suffered by economic activities, to a representation of damage composition and to the computation of reference damage values. Such a result supports the identification of the more vulnerable elements within the business sector as well as the estimation of the order of magnitude of potential damage, orienting modellers’ and decision-makers’ choices.