SURVEY: Evaluation of the Willingness To Contribute for flood mitigation policy

Description

Flood mitigation is a public good: everybody in the catchment benefits from it, and nobody can be excluded from the benefit. The willingness-to-contribute survey establishes what the people who benefit would actually be prepared to put towards it, which is the question that determines whether a scheme can be funded locally or has to depend entirely on the public budget.

The survey is administered to residents and users in the catchment, presenting the flood mitigation policy under consideration and asking what contribution — financial, in kind, or through changed practice on their own land — they would be willing to make. Asking about contribution rather than willingness to pay avoids some of the well-known objections to hypothetical payment questions and produces answers that relate more directly to what a financing arrangement could actually collect.

The results are used alongside the economic assessment, which establishes the value of the benefits, to establish the share of the cost that is locally recoverable.

Applications to decision making in the insurance sector

It identifies whether the beneficiaries of a measure are willing to co-finance it, which is the practical test of the claim that indirect beneficiaries should contribute to an NBS. Where the willingness exists, a financing arrangement can be built on it; where it does not, the case for a risk carrier's participation is correspondingly stronger or weaker depending on who the beneficiaries are.

Added value of this modelling approach

It converts a general statement about public support into a number that a financing plan can use, and it segments the population so that the arrangement can be designed for the groups that will actually take part.

What decision can be improved with this modelling approach

How much of a scheme's cost can be raised locally; which contribution mechanism to use; and how to present a scheme so that the people who benefit recognise what they are being asked to fund.