Environmental economist Katherine Zipp studies how floodplain damages affect long-term housing development in high flood-risk areas.
Flooding is the costliest natural disaster, according to environmental economist Katherine Zipp, assistant professor of environmental and resource economics and a faculty member in the Institutes of Energy and the Environment, at Penn State. She is part of a team that is studying how floodplain damages affect long-term housing development in high flood-risk areas. This includes a model that takes into consideration climate change and how that could impact flooding.
Over the last 20 years, flooding has caused $500 billion in global damages. In that same time period, flooding in the U.S. caused $60 billion in damages, $45 billion of which has occurred in the past five years.
As such, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was started more than 50 years ago to help mitigate these costs. Run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, the insurance program is an attempt to help minimize the impact of flooding through an affordable insurance program and the promotion of community flood management best practices.
With the NFIP, FEMA designated areas of land as flood zones. Within flood zones are high-risk areas called 100-year floodplains.
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