Flood Risk and Land Resilience: a Socio-Systemic Approach to Valuation

Natural calamities seriously affect the issue of the implementation of economic-valuation in land policy. Referring to the case of the flood in the Messina territory in 2009, whose damage was largely caused by the progressive loss of resilience of the land due to the over-exploitation of the ground by the anthropic settlements, the study proposes a valuation pattern based on the “imputed preferences”, aimed at comparing the economic commitment of the regional competent authorities with the financial amount of the damage and the required funding. Such a patrimonial valuation involves the consideration of the inter-temporal solidarity as defined, described and measured by the social discount rate envisaging the kind of goods involved, the dynamic of social preferences and some different hypotheses about the social inter-temporal preference rate