Framework for economic cost assessment of land subsidence

Land subsidence is increasingly recognised as a complex and costly challenge, especially in urban subsidence-prone areas. Often caused by overextraction of groundwater in order to meet increasing drinking and irrigation water demand, the expected damage from subsidence across the globe runs in the billions of dollars annually. Economic cost assessment can support the development of policies for dealing with subsidence, e.g. in problem analysis and evaluation of strategies. However, research on economic cost assessment of subsidence is limited and a standardized framework is lacking: this is an important basis for sound, comparable and consistent decision making and knowledge transfer across studies. Results from a review of existing literature indicate that that there is a (i) high variability in the literature in terms of subsidence characteristics and geographical origin, (ii) variation in addressed effects and applied economic assessment approaches and (iii) lack of a standardized assessment framework. This complicates comparison and value transfer of results across settings. In this context, we propose a standardized framework for economic cost assessment of land subsidence along the lines of direct and indirect, market and non-market effects