The Interreg IIIB project SAFECoast considers the question “How to manage our North Sea coasts in 2050?’ and focuses on the consequences of climate change and spatial developments with respect to safety from coastal flooding. Therefore, a team of coastal managers from the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and the UK are continuing their cooperation in SAFECoast which aims to build on each other’s experiences in, and understanding of coastal risk management. Flanders Hydraulics Research (FHR, located in Borgerhout, Belgium) has proposed a flood risk methodology in the past which makes it possible to compare different areas and different situations with a view to damage and risk calculations. In the past years, the methodology has been extended and improved, and meanwhile it is used in several studies in Flanders. This report is the contribution of Flanders Hydraulics Research to the SAFECoast project (action 3b). The goal is to compare basic parameters of the existing coastal risk methodologies and make an inventory of the strong and weak points of the different approaches. It is neither possible nor desirable to make a ranking of them. Because of data availability and case specific parameters and constraints, each methodology generally fits the best for the area they are made for. However we want to learn from them and incorporate good ideas to improve the existing methodologies. To improve coastal risk methodology means to make its results less uncertain, or more complete. In this study all the different sources of uncertainty are analysed and compared so it becomes possible to identify the weak links in the calculation chain
