On the modeling of significance for flood damage assessment

Despite decades of research, flood loss estimation is still a challenging task. Drawing on recent research, a number of major problems can be identified among them the question of what specific damages under what circumstances are seen as significant? It is sensible that people would choose risk management strategies according to their capacity to reduce significant damages, disregarding those ones which mainly influence losses not seen as significant. The question arises as to what damage is significant when? The paper proposes and tests a model for assessing significance through case studies in Australia and Italy. Despite the explorative nature of this paper, results provide evidence for (i) the importance of its systematic analysis, as a first step of damage assessment as well as (ii) the need for a deeper knowledge of significance.