Implications of cascading effects for the EU Floods Directive

What is it about?

The aim of our research is to understand the existence of any legislative gaps in the Floods Directive that could limit the preparedness to cascading events and critical infrastructures breakdowns.

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Why is it important?

The review of the state-of-the-art and the analysis of some case studies verified the hypothesis: despite significative efforts to improve the Floods Directive, open challenges remain associated with cascading events. The joint assessment of flooding events and critical infrastructures vulnerability seems far to be included together in a homogeneous process. The review suggests the existence of three priority areas to address: i) scientific limitations can generate high uncertainty or non-availability of data on the long-term impact of events, in particular when social damages are involved; ii) spatial scales can be difficult to determine if the trigger hazard causes the disruption of highly interconnected infrastructures, such as communication hubs, transportation nodes or strategic lines of energy supply; iii) cascading requires the acceptance of possible reasonable worst case scenarios, which probability sometimes is simply underestimated by policy makers or public and private managers.

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