Code of conduct for scientific integrity

The scientific landscape has changed considerably since the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences published Integrity in scientific research: Principles and procedures in 2008. Consequently, an expert group was set up with members from the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences, the Swiss National Science Foundation, swissuniversities, and Innosuisse to review the changes that have taken place in recent years and to draw up this Code of conduct for scientific integrity. This Code is aimed at everyone involved in the generation, dissemination, and advancement of knowledge within the Swiss higher education system. This includes scientists, institutions, and funding organisations. Institutions and funding organisations have a special role to play in creating and maintaining the conditions in which scientific integrity can thrive. Scientific integrity is based on the observance of fundamental principles and their many different contextual concretisations. These principles guide scien- tists in their research and teaching and help them to deal with the practical, ethical, and intellectual challenges they can expect to encounter. The aim of this code of conduct is to promote appropriate attitudes and to help build a robust culture of scientific integrity that will stand the test of time. Ethical scientific behaviour rests on the basic principles of reliability, honesty, respect, and accountability and supports the concretisations of these basic principles within a specific frame of reference. This Code is intended to be a dynamic document. Its aim is to strengthen scientific integrity in all avenues of research and education, with a particular emphasis on the training and development of young people. Another of its aims is to establish a culture of research integrity in the scientific community, with the Code providing a welcome framework rather than imposing its own set of rules. It promotes common understanding and parity of treatment in dealing with violations of scientific integrity within and between institutions. The Code also considers current developments in the fields of Open Science and social media, and it examines the issue of time limitation from several points of view. In addition, it offers practical recommendations on how to set up an organisation for the protection of scientific integrity and describes the processes involved

Kodex zur wissenschaftlichen Integrität

Im Jahr 2008 haben die Akademien der Wissenschaften Schweiz «Grundsätze und Verfahrensregeln zur wissenschaftlichen Integrität» veröffentlicht. Seitdem hat sich das wissenschaftliche Umfeld erheblich verändert. Um diesen Entwicklungen Rechnung zu tragen, hat eine ExpertInnengruppe mit VertreterInnen der Akademien der Wissenschaften Schweiz, des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds, swissuniversities und Innosuisse einen neuen Kodex zur wissenschaftlichen Integrität erarbeitet. Er basiert auf den Grundprinzipien Verlässlichkeit, Redlichkeit, Respekt und Verantwortung und trägt dazu bei, eine Kultur wissenschaftlicher Integrität nachhaltig zu stärken. Mit dem Kodex soll wissenschaftlich integres Verhalten in allen Aspekten von Forschung und Lehre, insbesondere auch bei der Ausbildung und Förderung des Nachwuchses gestärkt werden. Der Kodex berücksichtigt aktuelle Entwicklungen in den Bereichen Open Science und Social Media und beleuchtet das Thema Verjährung. Wie diese Standards in den eigenen Reglementen verankert und konkret umgesetzt werden, liegt in der Kompetenz der Hochschulen und Förderorganisationen.Akademien der Wissenschaften Schweiz (2021): Kodex für Wissenschaftliche Integrität. go.akademien-schweiz.ch/integrity. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4707584

How flood risks shape policies: flood exposure and risk perception in Swiss municipalities

Despite an increasing number of people exposed to flood risks in Europe, flood risk perception remains low and effective flood risk management policies are rarely implemented. It becomes increasingly important to understand how local governments can design effective flood risk management policies to address flood risks. In this article, we study whether high flood exposure and flood risk perception correlate with the demand for a specific design of flood risk management policies. We take the ideal case of Switzerland and analyze flood risk management portfolios in 18 flood-prone municipalities along the Aare River. We introduce a novel combination of risk analysis and public policy data: we analyze correlations between recorded flood exposure data and survey data on flood risk perception and policy preferences for selected flood risk management measures. Our results indicate that local governments with high flood risk perception tend to prefer non-structural measures, such as spatial planning and ecological river restoration, to infrastructure measures. In contrast, flood exposure is neither linked to flood risk perception nor to policy preferences. We conclude that flood risk perception is key: it can decisively affect local governments’ preferences to implement specific diversified policy portfolios including more preventive or integrated flood risk management measures. These findings imply that local governments in flood-prone areas should invest in raising their population’s awareness capacity of flood risks and keep it high during periods without flooding

Validation of 2D flood models with insurance claims

Flood impact modelling requires reliable models for the simulation of flood processes. In recent years, flood inundation models have been remarkably improved and widely used for flood hazard simulation, flood exposure and loss analyses. In this study, we validate a 2D inundation model for the purpose of flood exposure analysis at the river reach scale. We validate the BASEMENT simulation model with insurance claims using conventional validation metrics. The flood model is established on the basis of available topographic data in a high spatial resolution for four test cases. The validation metrics were calculated with two different datasets; a dataset of event documentations reporting flooded areas and a dataset of insurance claims. The model fit relating to insurance claims is in three out of four test cases slightly lower than the model fit computed on the basis of the observed inundation areas. This comparison between two independent validation data sets suggests that validation metrics using insurance claims can be compared to conventional validation data, such as the flooded area. However, a validation on the basis of insurance claims might be more conservative in cases where model errors are more pronounced in areas with a high density of values at risk

Extending coupled hydrological-hydraulic model chains with a surrogate model for the estimation of flood losses

In comparison to a local-scale flood risk analysis, modeling flood losses and risks at the river basin scale is challenging. Particularly in mountainous watersheds, extreme precipitation can be distributed spatially and temporally with remarkable variability. Depending on the topography of the river basin and the topological characteristics of the river network, certain rainfall patterns can lead to a synchronization of the flood peaks between tributaries and the main river. Thus, these complex interactions can lead to high variability in flood losses. In addition, flood inundation modeling at the river basin scale is computationally resource-intensive and the simulation of multiple scenarios is not always feasible. In this study, we present an approach for reducing complexity in flood-risk modeling at the river basin scale. We developed a surrogate model for flood loss analysis in the river basin by decomposing the river system into a number of subsystems. A relationship between flood magnitude and flood losses is computed for each floodplain in the river basin by means of a flood inundation and flood loss model at sub-meter resolution. This surrogate model for flood-loss estimation can be coupled with a hydrological-hydraulic model cascade, allowing to compute a high number of flood scenarios for the whole river system. The application of this model to a complex mountain river basin showed that the surrogate model approach leads to a reliable and computationally fast analysis of flood losses in a set of probable maximum precipitation scenarios. Hence, this approach offers new possibilities for stress test analyses and Monte-Carlo simulations in the analysis of system behavior under different system loads

Flood risk (d)evolution: Disentangling key drivers of flood risk change with a retro-model experiment

Flood risks are dynamically changing over time. Over decades and centuries, the main drivers for flood risk change are influenced either by perturbations or slow alterations in the natural environment or, more importantly, by socio-economic development and human interventions. However, changes in the natural and human environment are intertwined. Thus, the analysis of the main drivers for flood risk changes requires a disentangling of the individual risk components. Here, we present a method for isolating the individual effects of selected drivers of change and selected flood risk management options based on a model experiment. In contrast to purely synthetic model experiments, we built our analyses upon a retro-model consisting of several spatio-temporal stages of river morphology and settlement structure. The main advantage of this approach is that the overall long-term dynamics are known and do not have to be assumed. We used this model setup to analyse the temporal evolution of the flood risk, for an ex-post evaluation of the key drivers of change, and for analysing possible alternative pathways for flood risk evolution under different governance settings. We showed that in the study region the construction of lateral levees and the consecutive river incision are the main drivers for decreasing flood risks over the last century. A rebound effect in flood risk can be observed following an increase in settlements since the 1960s. This effect is not as relevant as the river engineering measures, but it will become increasingly relevant in the future with continued socio-economic growth. The presented approach could provide a methodological framework for studying pathways for future flood risk evolvement and for the formulation of narratives for adapting governmental flood risk strategies to the spatio-temporal dynamics in the built environment

Evaluating targeted heuristics for vulnerability assessment in flood impact model chains

In flood risk management, the choice of vulnerability functions has a remarkable impact on the overall uncertainty of modelling flood damage. The spatial transferability of empirical vulnerability functions is limited, leading to the need for computation and validation of region-specific vulnerability functions. In data-scarce regions however, this option is not feasible. In contrast, the physical processes of flood impact model chains can be developed in these regions because of the availability of global datasets. Here we evaluated the implementation of a synthetic vulnerability function into a flood impact model. The function bases on expert heuristics on a targeted sample of representative buildings (targeted heuristics). We applied the vulnerability function in a meso-scale river basin and evaluated the new function by comparing the resulting flood damage with the damage computed by other approaches, (1) an ensemble of vulnerability functions available from the literature, (2) an individual vulnerability function calibrated with region-specific data, and (3) the vulnerability function used in flood risk management by the Swiss government. The results show that targeted heuristics can be a valuable alternative for developing flood impact models in regions without any data or only few data on flood damage