ABSTRACT

About 60% of the surface of the Netherlands is located below sea level and this area is protected by a system of dikes. In 1953, a large flood in the southwest of the country initiated new research into making optimal decisions for flood risk reduction. Van Dantzig presented a risk-based cost-benefit analysis to determine the optimal crest level of the dikes (Van Dantzig 1956). Eijgenraam extended this cost-benefit analysis by taking future dike-heightenings (which are necessary due to e.g. sea level rise) and their investment times as decision variables in the model (Eijgenraam 2006). A description of the two models is given in Section 2.