Efficient or Fair? Operationalizing Ethical Principles in Flood Risk Management: A Case Study on the Dutch‐German Rhine

Abstract

Flood risk management decisions in many countries are based on decisionsupport frameworks which rely on cost-benefit analyses. Such frameworks are seldom informative about the geographical distribution of risk, raising questions on the fairness of the proposed policies. In the present work, we propose a new decision criterion that accounts for the distribution of risk reduction and apply it to support flood risk management decisions on a transboundary stretch of the Rhine River. Three types of interventions are considered: embankment heightening, making Room for the River, and changing the discharge distribution of the river branches. The analysis involves solving a flood risk management problem according to four alternative formulations, based on different ethical principles. Formulations based on cost optimization lead to very poor performances in some areas for the sake of reducing the overall aggregated costs. Formulations that also include equity criteria have different results depending on how these are defined. When risk reduction is distributed equally, very poor economic performance is achieved. When risk is distributed equally, results are in line with formulations based on cost optimization, while a fairer risk distribution is achieved. Risk reduction measures also differ, with the cost optimization approach strongly favoring the leverage of changing the discharge distribution and the alternative formulations spending more on embankment heightening and Room for the River, to rebalance inequalities in risk levels. The proposed method advances risk-based decision-making by allowing to consider risk distribution aspects and their impacts on the choice of risk reduction measures.

Enabling assessment of distributive justice through models for climate change planning: A review of recent advances and a research agenda

“…This requires postprocessing of performance metrics, either by aggregating them into a single composite indicator (Chung & Lee, 2009; Luis et al, 2019), or by keeping them separate and evaluating trade‐offs among them (Garner et al, 2016; Haasnoot et al, 2012). If policies are found through optimization, evaluation of justice can be included not only a posteriori, but also a priori in how the optimization problem is formulated (Ciullo et al, 2020; Gourevitch et al, 2020; Wild et al, 2019).…”

“…The second requirement is related to the reflection on the distributive moral principles, that is, the shape of the distribution, used to assess the distribution of the disaggregated metrics (requirement 4.1). When aggregating multiple performance metrics, or embedding them in an optimization problem, certain moral principles are (implicitly) used, such as utilitarian‐based maximization of overall welfare (Eijgenraam et al, 2016; Sáez & Requena, 2007), egalitarian‐based equalization of costs and benefits to all actors (Ciullo et al, 2020), or Rawls' difference principle of improvement for the least well‐off (Dennig et al, 2015; Gold et al, 2019; Gourevitch et al, 2020). The implicit adoption of a moral principle conceals the social justice preferences of the modelers and thus reduces the transparency of the model.…”

“…IAMs can be better equipped to address justice concerns in climate change planning, especially in assessing the distributional outcomes of alternative policies. There are already some examples of model‐based studies that allow for ad‐hoc justice evaluation in recent years (see e.g., Aerts et al (2018); Ciullo et al (2020); Gold et al (2019); Li et al (2018); Van Ruijven et al (2015)). For example, in the agricultural sector, Thornton et al (2010) simulate the distributional impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity in East Africa in order to identify winners and losers among countries.…”

Distributive Justice and Sustainability Goals in Transboundary Rivers: Case of the Nile Basin

“…At a more fundamental level, the question of what constitutes an "equitable and reasonable utilization" of transboundary water management is a rather challenging one. In spite of these challenges, however, research progress in domains such as cooperative game theories (Gintis, 2000;Madani and Dinar, 2012) and morally informed allocation and optimization techniques (Ciullo et al, 2020) illustrate potential opportunities and operationalization mechanisms of distributive justice in transboundary water resources management. In value optimization techniques, for instance, the role of distributive justice is illustrated through explicitly applying ethical principles to how optimization problems are formulated in terms of objectives and constraints (Tian et al, 2019;Ciullo et al, 2020).…”

“…In spite of these challenges, however, research progress in domains such as cooperative game theories (Gintis, 2000;Madani and Dinar, 2012) and morally informed allocation and optimization techniques (Ciullo et al, 2020) illustrate potential opportunities and operationalization mechanisms of distributive justice in transboundary water resources management. In value optimization techniques, for instance, the role of distributive justice is illustrated through explicitly applying ethical principles to how optimization problems are formulated in terms of objectives and constraints (Tian et al, 2019;Ciullo et al, 2020). For instance, assuming that Ethiopia and Egypt were to negotiate with the goal of achieving distributive justice between the two riparian states, a number of underlying moral principles (e.g., utilitarianism (Mill, 1895), egalitarianism (Arneson, 2002), prioritarianism (Arneson, 2000), sufficientarianism (Gosseries, 2011), and Pareto principle (Kaplow and Shavell, 2003)) can be identified and used to quantify options to facilitate negotiation between parties.…”