Decision support system for flood risk reduction policies: The case of a flood protection measure in the area of Vicenza

Abstract Climate change is one of the most significant and pressing issues faced by humanity; it frequently results in major natural disasters, such as catastrophic floods, which require the establishment of effective management policies by local and national authorities. These policies involve complex multistep decision-making processes that require combined assessment of various sources of data by different stakeholders. Even though an abundance of data is being collected to monitor climate change and estimate its consequences on the society, the environment, and the economy, policy-making is still largely based on intuition rather than evidence due to lack of a structured approach for modeling the decision-making process and considering the appropriate use of data in every step of the process. The goal of this work is to introduce a novel decision support system that can guide policy makers through a structured data-driven decision-making process aiming to create policies for flood risk management. The proposed system is a multifacet platform that guides policy makers through five phases—inform, advise, monitor, evaluate, and revise—of the policy cycle. For each phase, different dashboards provide relevant information regarding the environmental, social, and economic conditions. To demonstrate the potential of the proposed system, we use it to assess a flood protection policy in the city of Vicenza, Italy. The results reveal the benefits and challenges of the proposed decision support tool for public administrations involved in flood risk management.