Coastal risk assessment framework guidance document

The Resilience-Increasing Strategies for Coasts – Toolkit (RISC-KIT) FP7 EU project (2013-2017) aims to produce a set of three innovative and EU-coherent open-source and open-access methods, tools and management approaches (the RISC-KIT) in support of coastal managers, decision-makers and policy makers to reduce risk and increase resilience to low-frequency, high impact hydro-meteorological events. The Coastal Risk Assessment Framework (CRAF) is the first element of the risk assessment suite applied at a regional scale and permits a comprehensive and systematic approach to undertaking risk assessment at a variety of levels of detail. In particular, the approach reveals potential hotspots along the coasts. Hotspots are defined in the Toolkit as specific locations where high-resolution modelling and risk assessment are required to assess the coastal risk and to design and compare disaster risk reduction measures. As such, hotspots, or groups of hotspots, should be indicative of those areas where risk is highest. To do so the CRAF consists of a 2-phase approach, Phase 1 is a coastal-index approach to identifying potential hotspots, whereas Phase 2 utilises a suite of more complex modelling processes to rank these hotpots. The coastal INtegrated DisRuption Assessment model (INDRA) has specifically been developed as an open-source and open-access model for this purpose. This document provides guidance to CRAF users on both approaches, as well as explanations on the proposed methodologies. The CRAF is a prototype and will be trialled on the RISC-KIT case studies (WP5). Limitations in its application, the potential for a full application and the needs for further development will be discussed in Deliverable 5.1