Flood Damage Mitigation: A Review of Structural and Nonstructural Measures and Alternative Decision Frameworks

Literature from diverse sources such as public expenditure economics, management science, geography, agriculture, and engineering reveals a wide range of decision frameworks for deriving flood mitigation strategies. These different types of decision frameworks are reviewed in this paper. The aim is to provide an understanding of these frameworks, along with their relative adequacies and inadequacies. Such an understanding reveals the directions along which the formulation of a more adequate framework should proceed. However, the formulation of a given decision framework is influenced by the types of economic benefits associated with the flood mitigation measures considered in that framework. Hence the various flood mitigation measures are reviewed, prior to the various decision frameworks.