Promoting adaptive flood risk management: the role and potential of flood recovery mechanisms

There is a high potential for recovery mechanisms to be used to incentivise the uptake of flood mitigation and loss reduction measures, undertake adaptation and promote community resilience. Indeed, creating a resilient response to flooding requires flood risk management approaches to be aligned and it needs to be ensured that recovery mechanisms to not provide disincentives for individuals and business to take proactive action to reduce risk. However, the degree to which it is desirable and effective for insurers and governments providing compensation to promote resilience and risk reduction depends upon how the cover or compensation is organised and the premiums which are charged. A review of international flood recovery mechanisms has been undertaken to identify firstly the types of schemes that exist and their characteristics. Analysis of existing instruments highlights that there are various potential approaches to encourage or require the uptake of flood mitigation and also discourage the construction of new development in high flood risk. However despite the presence of these instruments, those organising recovery mechanisms could be doing much more to incentivise increased resilience

SECaps: A Sequence Enhanced Capsule Model for Charge Prediction

Automatic charge prediction aims to predict appropriate final charges according to the fact descriptions for a given criminal case. Automatic charge prediction plays a critical role in assisting judges and lawyers to improve the efficiency of legal decisions, and thus has received much attention. Nevertheless, most existing works on automatic charge prediction perform adequately on high-frequency charges but are not yet capable of predicting few-shot charges with limited cases. In this paper, we propose a Sequence Enhanced Capsule model, dubbed as SECaps model, to relieve this problem. Specifically, following the work of capsule networks, we propose the seq-caps layer, which considers sequence information and spatial information of legal texts simultaneously. Then we design a attention residual unit, which provides auxiliary information for charge prediction. In addition, our SECaps model introduces focal loss, which relieves the problem of imbalanced charges. Comparing the state-of-the-art methods, our SECaps model obtains 4.5% and 6.4% absolutely considerable improvements under Macro F1 in Criminal-S and Criminal-L respectively. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the superiorities and competitiveness of our proposed model.Comment: 13 pages, 3figures, 5 table

Sticks and carrots for reducing property-level risks from floods: an EU-US comparative perspective

In discussing legal and policy frameworks for flood risk management, the attention is often put on increasing resilience in public spaces. In terms of private properties, discussions are geared toward enhancing the adaptive capacity of future developments. This paper focuses on the instruments associated with resilience of existing privately owned residential buildings mainly from the perspective of post-flood policies and compensation regimes. The paper scrutinizes the relevant legal and policy landscapes in the United States, the European Union and two Member States – the UK and the Netherlands. The goal is to provide mutual lessons learned between the EU, its Member States, and the US and to set forth generally applicable recommendations for improving post-flood policies for existing buildings

Dealing with flood damages: will prevention, mitigation and ex-post compensation provide for a resilient triangle?

There is a wealth of literature on the design of ex-post compensation mechanisms for natural disasters. However, more research needs to be done on the manner in which these mechanisms could steer citizens toward adopting individual level preventive and protection measures in the face of flood risks. This paper provides a comparative legal analysis of the financial compensation mechanisms following floods, be it through insurance, public funds or a combination of both, with an empirical focus on Belgium, the Netherlands, England and France. Similarities and differences between the methods in which these compensation mechanisms for flood damages enhance resilience are analyzed. The comparative analysis especially focuses on the link between the recovery strategy on the one hand and prevention and mitigation strategies on the other. There is great potential within the recovery strategy for promoting preventive action, for example in terms of discouraging citizens from living in high-risk areas, or encouraging the uptake of mitigation measures, such as adaptive building. However, this large potential is yet to be realized, in part due to insufficient consideration and promotion of these connections within existing legal frameworks. Recommendations are made about how the linkages between strategies can be further improved. These recommendations relate to, amongst others, the promotion of resilient reinstatement through recovery mechanisms and the removal of legal barriers preventing the establishment of link-inducing measures

Assessing the legitimacy of flood risk governance arrangements in Europe: insights from intra-country evaluations

Legitimacy has received comparatively less attention than societal resilience in the context of flooding, thus methods for assessing and monitoring the legitimacy of Flood Risk Governance Arrangements (FRGA) are noticeably lacking. This study attempts to address this gap by assessing the legitimacy of FRGAs in six European countries through cross-disciplinary and comparative research methods. On the basis of this assessment, recommendation

The European Union approach to flood risk management and improving societal resilience: lessons from the implementation of the Floods Directive in six European countries

Diversity in flood risk management approaches is often considered to be a strength. However in some national settings, and especially for transboundary rivers, variability and the incompatibility of approaches can reduce the effectiveness of flood risk management. Placed in the context of increasing flood risks, as well as the potential for flooding to undermine the European Union's sustainable development goals, a desire to increase societal resilience to flooding has prompted the introduction of a common European Framework. This paper provides a legal and policy analysis of the implementation of the Floods Directive (2007/60/EC) in six countries; Belgium (Flemish Region), England, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. Evaluation criteria from existing legal and policy literature frame the study of the Directive and its impact on enhancing or constraining societal resilience by using an adaptive governance approach. These criteria are initially used to analyze the key components of the EU approach, before providing insight of the implementation of the Directive at a national level. Similarities and differences in the legal translation of European goals into existing flood risk management are analyzed alongside their relative influence on policy and practice. The research highlights that the impact of the Floods Directive on increasing societal resilience has been nationally variable, in part due to its focus on procedural obligations, rather than on more substantive requirements. Analysis shows that despite a focus on transboundary river basin management, in some cases existing traditions of flood risk management, have overridden objectives to harmonize flood risk management. This could be strengthened by requiring more stringent cooperation and providing the competent authorities in International River Basins Districts with more power. Despite some shortcomings in directly impacting flood risk outcomes, the Directive has positively stimulated discussion and flood risk management planning in countries that were perhaps lagging behind

A Theoretical Framework for Target Propagation

The success of deep learning, a brain-inspired form of AI, has sparked interest in understanding how the brain could similarly learn across multiple layers of neurons. However, the majority of biologically-plausible learning algorithms have not yet reached the performance of backpropagation (BP), nor are they built on strong theoretical foundations. Here, we analyze target propagation (TP), a popular but not yet fully understood alternative to BP, from the standpoint of mathematical optimization. Our theory shows that TP is closely related to Gauss-Newton optimization and thus substantially differs from BP. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a fundamental limitation of difference target propagation (DTP), a well-known variant of TP, in the realistic scenario of non-invertible neural networks. We provide a first solution to this problem through a novel reconstruction loss that improves feedback weight training, while simultaneously introducing architectural flexibility by allowing for direct feedback connections from the output to each hidden layer. Our theory is corroborated by experimental results that show significant improvements in performance and in the alignment of forward weight updates with loss gradients, compared to DTP.Comment: 13 pages and 4 figures in main manuscript; 41 pages and 8 figures in supplementary materia

Local prediction of turning points of oscillating time series

For oscillating time series, the prediction is often focused on the turning points. In order to predict the turning point magnitudes and times it is proposed to form the state space reconstruction only from the turning points and modify the local (nearest neighbor) model accordingly. The model on turning points gives optimal prediction at a lower dimensional state space than the optimal local model applied directly on the oscillating time series and is thus computationally more efficient. Monte Carlo simulations on different oscillating nonlinear systems showed that it gives better predictions of turning points and this is confirmed also for the time series of annual sunspots and total stress in a plastic deformation experiment.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, submitted to PR

Governance strategies for improving flood resilience in the face of climate change

Flooding is the most common of all natural disasters and accounts for large numbers of casualties and a high amount of economic damage worldwide. To be ‘flood resilient’, countries should have sufficient capacity to resist, the capacity to absorb and recover, and the capacity to transform and adapt. Based on international comparative research, we conclude that six key governance strategies will enhance ‘flood resilience’ and will secure the necessary capacities. These strategies pertain to: (i) the diversification of flood risk management approaches; (ii) the alignment of flood risk management approaches to overcome fragmentation; (iii) the involvement, cooperation, and alignment of both public and private actors in flood risk management; (iv) the presence of adequate formal rules that balance legal certainty and flexibility; (v) the assurance of sufficient financial and other types of resources; (vi) the adoption of normative principles that adequately deal with distributional effects. These governance strategies appear to be relevant across different physical and institutional contexts. The findings may also hold valuable lessons for the governance of climate adaptation more generally