French Insurance and Flood Risk: Assessing the Impact of Prevention Through the Rating of Action Programs for Flood Prevention

Abstract

French insurance is part of a public–private partnership with the French State to compensate flood-related damages, and there is growing concern among insurers about damaging climatic events. To promote preventive actions as well as to take them into account in flood risk assessment, insurers have recently expressed the need to develop a rating system of preventive actions. This study identified Action Programs for Flood Prevention (Programme d’Action pour la Prévention des Inondations—PAPI) as the key French public policy instrument: they provide an overview of the diversity of actions that are conducted locally at the relevant risk basin scale. A database of all intended actions in the 145 launched PAPIs was constructed and the actions were coded (88 codes). The analysis consisted of two steps: (1) We conducted an expert valuation using the Analytic Network Process and the Analytic Hierarchy Process, aiming at creating an experimental national rating system. The results show the importance of implementing an integrated strategy that particularly emphasizes land use planning and urban planning. This appears even sounder as individual actions show relatively limited effectiveness. (2) The ratings of actions were applied to each PAPI according to their implemented actions. The resulting scores for individual PAPIs, as local risk coping capacity indicators, show great variance ranging from 8 to 324 points. This confirms the need to take prevention into account in flood risk assessment.

Keywords

Action programs for flood prevention (PAPI) / Collective flood prevention / Flood disaster insurance / Flood vulnerability assessment / France

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