AKUT – INCENTIVE SYSTEMS FOR MUNICIPAL FLOOD PREVENTION

The project AKUT was funded by the BMU from 01 January 2019 to 28 February 2021.

Motivation

As a result of climate change, heavy rains are increasing in frequency and intensity. Regionally limited exceptional heavy rain events, as frequently observed in recent years, can hit all regions in Germany. For technical and economic reasons, municipal drainage systems cannot be designed to handle such exceptional rainfall events.

The flood safety of municipal drainage systems during heavy rainfall is, in view of the high level of damage, one of the central challenges faced by urban drainage systems. In order to protect against heavy rain-induced flooding, neither the introduction of design surcharges nor the enlargement of existing channel nominal sizes makes sense. Instead, flood prevention adapted to the site-specific requirements is required as part of municipal heavy rain risk management.

Due to the complexity of the task, an interdisciplinary cooperation of various municipal actors at different levels is required (political-administrative level, municipal planning level, object-related level). An essential prerequisite for this is the development of a cross-departmental and stakeholder understanding of problems for the “municipal joint task of flood prevention”. For the individual actors, there is still no willingness to coordinate the respective competing action goals, to overcome conflicting goals. and to subordinate oneself to an optimized overall solution process. In particular, there are no actor-related motivations and incentives to ensure the effectiveness of the measures.

Goals

The aim of the project AKUT is to carry out an extensive analysis of the actors involved in the “municipal joint task of flood prevention” in order to gain a better knowledge of the interests, roles, and spheres of influence of the individual actors and to describe their mutual influences and dependencies. Based on this, a flexible, situation-dependent optimization and incentive system for the calculation and implementation of optimized overall solutions for municipal flood prevention is developed. The developed methodology is then implemented in the form of a decision support tool and linked to existing software solutions. The resulting decision support tool is, thus, applicable to different municipalities or threat scenarios and provides support both in identifying appropriate precautionary measures and in selecting appropriate incentives to ensure their implementation by the various actors.

Further Information

Further information about the project can be found on the project website at Mainz University of Applied Sciences.

Partners

• Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Sciences – Professorship of Complex Networks – Prof. Dr. Clemens Thielen
• Mainz University of Applied Sciences – Professorship of Water Resource Management and Sanitary Environmental Engineering – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Inka Kaufmann-Alves
• igr AG Rockenhausen
• Association of Municipalities Enkenbach-Alsenborn

Funded by