The French Cat’ Nat’ system: post-flood recovery and resilience issues

Successive French governments have progressively decentralised flood control policy to increase the role of local authorities in planning and crisis management. In 1982, a law mandated local risk maps for 5 types of exceptional natural hazards and set up Cat’ Nat’, a national system of damage compensation based on an insurance super-fund. While this system clearly improved the situation of victims of extreme events through subsidies in housing and infrastructure reconstruction, it did not necessarily foster a parallel reduction of vulnerability: insurance is more tuned to the past than to the future, and the tacit rule supports identical reconstruction so as not to increase the pre-disaster vulnerability (but not reducing it either). Yet indirectly, the recognition of a state of natural disaster triggers vulnerability reduction later, through various measures at various scales, from housing level (build back better) to the PAPI (action programmes for flood prevention); we describe them and present a case study before presenting hypotheses to explain the resistance of private landowners as well as potential improvements to better bridge recovery and resilience.