**1. Introduction**

The gradual increase in the global temperature brings multiple problems which will significantly affect people's lives, with problems that are directly related to people's everyday life, but also ones that will appear unexpectedly [1]. The increase in precipitation phenomena globally [2] is one of the results of climate change that should particularly concern humanity. In Europe, precipitation trends differ depending on the latitude; the northern part receives a higher percentage of rain by 10–40%, while the southern part of the continent in some areas faces up to a 20% decrease [3]. Despite the fact of decreased rainfall in some areas, a growing number of studies show that there is evidence of an increase in extreme precipitation events [4–6]. Future precipitation extreme trends sugges<sup>t</sup> that the sub-daily extreme rainfall of 50 year and 100 year return periods will triple under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario [7]. With southern Europe's extreme hot and dry days, extreme precipitation events will have much worse consequences [8], making flood events a greater risk than expected.

For the managemen<sup>t</sup> and monitoring of floods in urban areas, the European Commission established the Flood Directive (2007/60/EC) [9]. The main scope of the framework is the reduction of adverse flood effects on the environment, human health, cultural heritage, and economic activities that are directly linked to society. The member states of the European Union were obligated to establish a River Basin Flood Risk Management

**Citation:** Culibrk, A.; Tzoraki, O. ´ Assessing the Economic Damage of Potential Flooding Zones by Combining Cadaster and Land Use Data in the Larnaca Region, Cyprus. *Environ. Sci. Proc.* **2023**, *25*, 76. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ECWS-7-14323

Academic Editor: Athanasios Loukas

Published: 12 April 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Plan, identifying vulnerable areas considering long-term developments and future flood occurrence. The key objective of the flood risk assessment on a country's level is flood hazard maps, which show, based on the flood probability, the flood extent, the depth, and the flow speed. In addition, the flood risk maps assess the potential adverse consequences for the economic activity of the area, as well as for potentially affected residents.

The Republic of Cyprus, as a member state of the European Union, had already incorporated the provisions of Directive 2007/60/EC into Cypriot law in 2010. With the main evaluation parameters being the size of the river basin area (greater than 10 km2), the proximity to urban developed areas, and the historical overflow of the river, 19 areas of potentially significant flood risk were defined. A key element in the flood risk assessment is the listing of important public elements that will be affected, as well as the economic activities of the area. An integrated coast damage assessment, however, is not analyzed in the flood managemen<sup>t</sup> plans.

In the study of flood damage assessment for each continent, Huizinga et al. [10] created a methodology based on extensive literature reviews and surveys to assess the economic damage induced by flood depth. For the purpose of overcoming the barrier of comparing flood damage assessments from different countries, normalized damage functions at a national scale were utilized. Adapting the methodology followed by the above-mentioned study at a regional scale, the Cyprus depth damage curve (DDC), at a national scale, was updated based on the Gross Domestic Product of 2021. Furthermore, having one of the biggest cities of Cyprus, Larnaca, as a pilot study area, the methodology was applied within the extent of the potential flooding zones of 20, 100, and 500 year return periods. Adapting the methodology for the data of the residential buildings from Cyprus's cadaster, the study aims to compare the differences in the damage assessment based on nationaland local-based economic data.
