Flood damage to cultural heritage is often overlooked, despite potentially severe impacts. A Florence case study estimated average losses exceeding EUR 5 million per site during a major flood. By assessing damage to both buildings and artworks, the study shows heritage sites can be more vulnerable than homes. Including them in flood risk planning is essential to protect their cultural and economic value.

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 premises 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.