Announcement_paper1

Happy to share that my paper “Quantifying the hidden carbon cost of floods: a stochastic and uncertainty-based valuation framework” has been accepted for publication in Environmental Research Letters!

Floods cause billions of dollars in damages each year, but current methods to assess the value of flood risk typically only consider the financial cost to replace damaged assets. Making those repairs requires the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing of those materials into final products, and transportation from the extraction site to the manufacturer and the installation location. In this paper, we developed a Monte Carlo analysis framework to simulate flood losses to residential buildings that incorporates life-cycle environmental impact data for each component within a building that may be damaged by a flood. Using this framework we developed depth-emissions curves to estimate the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with repairing flood damages from a given flood depth, and after applying a social cost of carbon emissions estimate we found that incorporating GHG emissions into flood risk assessments can increase the total value of estimated impacts by over 6%.