Integrated Assessment of Natural Hazards and Climate Change Adaptation: I. The KULTURisk Methodological Framework

A conceptual framework integrating different disciplines has been developed to comprehensively evaluate the benefits of risk prevention. Three main innovations are proposed with regards to the state of the art: (1) to include the social capacities of reducing risk, (2) to go beyond the estimation of direct tangible costs, and (3) to provide an operational solution to assess risks, impacts and the benefits of plausible risk reduction measures. The traditional risk metric in the physical sciences is the expected damage (direct tangible costs), which is defined as a function of hazard, vulnerability (physical) and exposure. The last element, exposure, provides the information to convert results into monetary terms. In the development of the KULTURisk Framework (KR-FWK), we considered several different pre-existing proposals, and we designed a new one as a conceptual model and also a flow-chart for the elaboration of information. The proposed KR-FWK is thus expected to provide: 1) an operational basis for multidisciplinary integration; 2) a flexible reference to deal with heterogeneous case studies and potentially various types of hazards; and 3) a means to support the assessment of alternative risk prevention measures including consideration of social and cultural dimensions. The project case studies of the process are expected to provide a quite diversified set of situations, allowing to consolidate the framework itself and to develop ad hoc tailored solutions for most common implementation cases.