Just retreat—how different countries deal with it: examples from Austria and England

Flood risk management has developed a large inventory of potential actions to climate-related hazards. Within this wide array of measures, managed retreat of communities at risk is usually only taken into account if other strategies are ineffective or unavailable. Communities who are affected by managed retreat are confronted with radical changes in their livelihood. However, managed retreat is highly contested. The use of managed retreat includes not only the relocation of house owners but also has the challenge that it discriminates between landowners as some gain and others lose. Therefore, managed retreat raises issues of social justice. To mitigate the impact on land, compensation plays a crucial role in flood risk management. The level and kind of compensation varies between countries across the globe. In this paper, we compare two different policy compensation frameworks in two European countries: Austria and England. The comparative study shows how different compensation schemes affect social justice, both in terms of substantive distributions but also in terms of procedural justice.