Natural disaster prevention: aiming for the long term without waiting.

Summary The urbanization of areas exposed to natural hazards is significant and will increase. Economic analysis proposes several tools to control this phenomenon: risk-adjusted insurance pricing, and zoning and building standards in exposed areas. These two tools are theoretically equivalent, but their respective applications raise different difficulties, and the financial incentives have been excessively reduced in France. In both cases, greater rigor will be opposed because it will affect certain locations more specifically. We discuss this difficult management of the existing and explain that grandfather rights or expropriations cannot be considered as sustainable answers.