Valuation of flood risk in The Netherlands: Some preliminary results

So far no extensive literature exists on the valuation of extreme natural hazards pertaining low frequency and high potential impact. In this paper, we attain to fill this gap with the study of flood risk in the Netherlands by means of a stated preference approach. From the choice experiments in our large-scale questionnaire, we expect to receive the estimates of the value of statistical life in flooding, the valuation of inconvenience from getting an injury in flooding and the valuation of inconvenience from a precautionary evacuation. There are two persistent problems encountered in this research: extremely low yearly probabilities of a flood and of dying in a flood (which might be ignored by the respondents in making trade-offs); and flood protection being 100% public responsibility that might further depress individual risk valuation. In order to overcome these problems in our survey, we provide respondents with extensive visualised probability explanations, such as graphic grid paper and risk ladder, before presenting them with choice experiments.