Frameworks And Guidelines Applied At NAIAD

What this list is

The frameworks and guidance on this page were already established when the project began. They come from the professional practice of the fields the project worked in — cost appraisal, damage assessment, indicator design, design methodology — and they were applied within it because an assessment that ignores the convention its audience uses will not be read by that audience.

Applying them was not a formality. Each had been written for a context in which the hazard is given and the intervention is engineered, and each had to be examined for whether it survives the case where the hazard itself is changed by the intervention. That examination is part of what the project contributes, and it is recorded on the pages linked here.

Economic appraisal conventions

Life cycle costs methodology — the convention that an intervention is costed over its whole life rather than by its construction cost, applied here because the maintenance and renewal profile of a natural system differs from that of a built one.

Economic damage costs — the established approach of converting a hazard into a loss through damage functions, applied here to a hazard whose depth and extent are themselves changed by the intervention being appraised.

Estimating rapidly the cost-effectiveness of nature-based flood mitigation schemes using the flood-excess volume — the published technique for comparing schemes against a fixed standard of protection, applied as a screening step before a full appraisal is commissioned.

Risk and design frameworks

Catastrophe risk modelling structure for insured damages — the structure the insurance industry uses to convert a hazard into an expected loss, applied so that the effect of an intervention can be expressed in the terms in which a premium or a claim is set.

Designing and using indicators to assess the efficacy (effectiveness) of Nature Based Solutions — the indicator framework applied to establish what is measured when the performance of a measure is reported, and what the choice of indicator commits the assessment to.

Reading these together

Three of the five are conventions about money and one is a convention about risk; the fifth is about evidence. Between them they establish the terms in which a Nature Based Solution proposal will be judged by the bodies that have to approve it, and they are the reason the project's own frameworks are expressed in those terms rather than in ones of its own invention.