Cost assessments of the overall economic impacts of natural hazards as well as costs of prevention and responses to natural hazards supply crucial information for decision support and policy development in the fields of natural hazard management and climate change adaptation planning. However, the significant diversity in methods that are currently applied and terminology used in costs assessments of different natural hazards and impacted sectors make it difficult to establish comprehensive, robust and reliable cost figures, and also hinder comparison of costs across countries, across hazards and across impacted sectors.

The objective of this special issue is to presents current knowledge on methods for assessing individual cost types (such as direct damages to housing, long-term losses in the macro-economy, as well as costs of risk reduction) and show how these methods are used in the context of various natural hazards (e.g. floods, droughts, alpine hazards, coastal hazards). Papers are welcome in the areas of assessing these various types of damage induced by natural hazards as well as contributions that focus on the cost-effectiveness or efficiency of risk reduction to natural hazards and adaptation to increasing weather risks that are due to climate change. Papers may cover for instance data collection, model development, validation, uncertainty analysis, and the application of damage models in case studies.