Flood damage data are key to understanding territorial risks and supporting the design of mitigation measures. However, such data are scarce, and the available ones often lack a high level of detail. We conducted a field survey of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings affected by the record-breaking flood event that hit Italy’s Marche region in 2022. The resulting datasets cover 256 assets and include detailed information on damage, building features, and mitigation measures.

Environmental assets are crucial to sustaining and fulfilling life on Earth via ecosystem services (ESs). Studying their flood risk is thus seminal, in addition to being required by several norms. However, this field is not yet adequately developed. We studied the exposure component of flood risk and developed an evaluating methodology based on the ESs provided by environmental assets to discern assets and areas that are more important than others with metrics suitable to large-scale studies.

This work describes the flood damage to cultural heritage (CH) that occurred in September 2022 in central Italy. Datasets related to flood impacts on cultural heritage are rare, and this work aims at highlighting both tangible and intangible aspects and their correlation with physical characteristics of flood (i.e. water depth and flow velocity). The results show that current knowledge and datasets are inadequate for risk assessment of CH.

Floods may affect critical infrastructure which provides essential services to people. We analyse the impact of floods on road networks and water supply systems, and we investigate how cascade effects propagate if interdependencies among networks are not considered. The analysis shows that if preparedness plans include information on accessibility to key sections of water supply plants, less people suffer from water shortage in case of flood. The method is tested in the city of Florence (Italy).

Flood risk management requires a realistic estimation of flood losses. However, the capacity of available flood damage models to depict real damages is questionable. With a joint effort of eight research groups, the objective of this study was to compare the performances of nine models for the estimation of flood damage to buildings. The comparison provided more objective insights on the transferability of the models and on the reliability of their estimations.