Toon Haer

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU · The Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM)

Recent floods in the United States and Asia again highlighted their devastating effects, and without investments in adaptation, the future impact of floods will continue to increase. Key to making accurate flood-risk projections are assessments of how disaster-risk reduction (DRR) measures reduce risk and how much risk remains after adaptation. Cur...

Current coastal flood risk assessments fail to capture flood spatial dependence at large scales. In this paper, we develop the first global synthetic dataset of spatially-dependent extreme sea level events, by applying an existing conditional multivariate statistical model to 40-year global reanalysis sea levels. The resulting dataset contains 10,0...

In this study, we couple an integrated flood damage and agent-based model (ABM) with a gravity model of internal migration and a flood risk module (DYNAMO-M) to project household adaptation and migration decisions under increasing coastal flood risk in France. We ground the agent decision rules in a framework of subjective expected utility theory....

Elevated flood risk due to sea level rise is expected to increase migration from coastal areas. This presents an enormous policy challenge given the hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas globally. Despite its relevance, little empirical research has been done on what drives coastal residents to migrate or stay under incre...

Coastal flood risk is a serious global challenge facing current and future generations. Several disaster risk reduction (DRR) measures have been posited as ways to reduce the deleterious impacts of coastal flooding. On the global scale, however, efforts to model the effects of DRR measures (beyond structural) in the future are limited. In this pape...

Drought is a persistent hazard that impacts the environment, people's livelihoods, access to education and food security. Adaptation choices made by people can influence the propagation of this drought hazard. However, few drought models incorporate adaptive behavior and feedbacks between adaptations and drought. In this research, we present a dyna...

Flood risk management in the USA is largely embedded in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Climate change and increasing exposure in flood plains pose a challenge to flood risk managers and make it vital to reduce risk in the future. The proposed reforms are steering the NFIP to risk-based premiums, but it is uncertain if the reforms will...

Reforms are required to maintain a healthy and robust flood insurance market under future climate conditions for the United States. Therefore, policymakers should implement premiums that reflect flood risk and incentivize household-level risk reduction, complemented with regional flood adaptation investments. Charging flood insurance premiums that...

Coastal flood risk is expected to increase as a result of climate change effects, such as sea level rise, and socioeconomic growth. To support policymakers in making adaptation decisions, accurate flood risk assessments that account for the influence of complex adaptation processes on the developments of risks are essential. In this study, we integ...

Conventional green roofs have often been criticised for their limited water buffer capacity during extreme rainfall events and for their susceptibility to droughts when additional irrigation is unavailable. One solution to these challenges is to create an extra blue water retention layer underneath the green layer. Blue-green roofs allow more storm...

Improving assessments of droughts risk for smallholder farmers requires a better understanding of the interaction between individual adaptation decisions and drought risk. Agent-based modeling is increasingly used to capture the interaction between individual decision-making and the environment. In this paper, we provide a review of drought risk ag...

Flood insurance coverage can enhance financial resilience of households to changing flood risk caused by climate change. However, income inequalities imply that not all households can afford flood insurance. The uptake of flood insurance in voluntary markets may decline when flood risk increases as a result of climate change. This increase in flood...

In Eastern Africa, increasing climate variability and changing socioeconomic conditions are exacerbating the frequency and intensity of drought disasters. Droughts pose a severe threat to food security in this region, which is characterized by a large dependency on smallholder rain-fed agriculture and a low level of technological development in the...

Extreme wind events are among the costliest natural disasters in Europe, causing severe damages every year. Despite the significant impact, damages related to windstorms are an understudied topic in academia. For damage estimates, the community mostly relies on post-disaster insurance data, which is often not publicly available. Few studies offer m...

With increasing flood risk due to climate change and socioeconomic trends, governments are under pressure to continue implementing flood protection measures, such as dikes, to reduce flood risk. However, research suggests that a sole focus on government-funded flood protection leads to an adverse increase in exposure as people and economic activiti...

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of flood risk adaptation strategies offers policymakers insight into economically optimal strategies for adapting to sea level rise. However, building-level adaptation measures such as floodproofing or building elevation are often evaluated at aggregated spatial scales, which may result in sub-optimal investment decision...

Despite the significant impact, damages related to windstorms are an understudied topic in academia. For damage estimates, the community mostly relies on post-disaster insurance data, which is often not publicly available. Few studies offer more generic tools, but again these are often based on non-disclosed insurance data. To offer a generic, high...

Recent studies showed that climate change and socioeconomic trends are expected to increase flood risks in many regions. However, in these studies, human behavior is commonly assumed to be constant, which neglects interaction and feedback loops between human and environmental systems. This neglect of human adaptation leads to a misrepresentation of...

Many countries around the world face increasing impacts from flooding due to socio-economic development in flood-prone areas, which may be enhanced in intensity and frequency as a result of climate change. With increasing flood risk, it is becoming more important to be able to assess the costs and benefits of adaptation strategies. To guide the des...

ContextHedgerows are typical landscape features of high environmental and cultural value that often have been sacrificed for agricultural intensification and scale enlargement. Objectives We studied the dynamics of hedgerow quality over time in a case study area renowned for its hedgerow landscapes: South West Devon (UK) answering the following res...

Economic losses as a result of natural hazards have been rising over the past few decades due to socio-economic development and perhaps climate change. This upwards trend is projected to continue, highlighting the need for adequate adaptation strategies. This raises the question of how to determine which adaptation strategies are preferred to cope...

Recent studies showed that climate change and socioeconomic trends are expected to increase flood risks in many regions. However, in these studies, human behavior is commonly assumed to be constant, which neglects interaction and feedback loops between human and environmental systems. This neglect of human adaptation leads to a misrepresentation of...

Flood risk management is becoming increasingly important, because more people are settling in flood-prone areas, and flood risk is increasing in many regions due to extreme weather events associated with climate change. It has been proposed that appropriately designed flood risk communication campaigns can stimulate floodplain inhabitants to prepar...

Global sea-level rise poses a significant threat not only for coastal communities as development continues but also for national economies. This paper presents estimates of how future changes in relative sea-level rise puts coastal populations at risk, as well as affect overall GDP in the conterminous United States. We use four different sea-level...