This is the question that Trinomics and our partners aimed to answer through the recently finished ESPON EU-TITAN project (“European Territorial Impacts Tackled by improved economic Appraisal of Natural Disasters”). Using innovative methodologies, the project analysed the distribution and territorial patterns of the impacts of four natural hazards that often occur in Europe, namely river floods, storms, droughts, and earthquakes. Trinomics’ work specifically focused on the estimation of the direct and indirect economic impacts that these hazard types caused to NUTS3 regions across Europe between 1995 to 2017. Our analysis showed that indirect impacts, which are induced in one region by disruption of economic activities in another region, can be almost as large as the direct impacts, which are the damages and losses occurring in a region as a result of a natural disaster. Apart from the economic impact assessment, our partners also developed a territorial vulnerability assessment based on regional hazard susceptibility and coping capacity. 

You can find the results of EU-TITAN in the final report here. For a more detailed look at the economic impact analysis, you can read Annex 2 of the final report, found here.