## 5 Conclusions and Recommendations  
Flood management practices have evolved. Risk-based flood management is now generally recognized around the world. Nevertheless, design procedures and criteria follow the probability-based design of flood management schemes. An estimate of risk reduction of a proposed flood management project can be made using risk analysis to help decision-makers select the most viable option. The Kaldor-Hicks compensation principle acts as the ruling principle for floodplain management systems. It establishes the governing rule that benefits should exceed the cost before policies and projects are sanctioned. The research also recommends that objective flood management should be the \"welfare of society\" by assigning the same weightage to all individuals. For risk-based flood management, CBA is recommended to determine the efficiency of a project and define the best composition of a project. Costs can be estimated for the service life using discounting  
Figure 5: Illustration of flood management costs, benefits, benefit–cost ratio (BC ratio), net present value (NPV), and ORP concepts and their relative variations as efforts to reduce flood damage increase. procedures, and the benefits can be equated to the damage avoided. The benefits of a project are, therefore, equal to the difference in damage due to the project. Intangible losses must be included in the analysis. In the analysis, social and environmental assets are as important as economic assets in order to obtain reliable outcomes. However, the conversion of an intangible component into scalar monetary value remains controversial. The exclusion of intangibles is, however, a worse option. Developing intangible-to-tangible value criteria at the national level can reduce disagreements. Such criteria could be used for all types of projects at the national level as well. CRA is an effective option to single out the most effective flood management option by analyzing the risks of alternative projects or policies while considering that the lowest risk is the most appropriate solution. CRA is a useful tool to determine ORP for any master plan consisting of flood management measures and land use in a floodplain. Normally, the results of a CBA can be represented using economic efficiency indicators, and these indicators are used to find the most adequate measure. The BC ratio is used to express, with confidence, the proportion of what has been spent and achieved during the decision appraisal, while IRR is used to determine the return of the project throughout its service life. IRR, NPV, and BC ratio are common indicators to express the feasibility or priority of projects within a master plan. However, for flood management, _EAD_ is strongly recommended to envisage the performance of land-use practices and flood measures simultaneously. It can be concluded that the efficiency of floodplain land use is at its maximum at ORP under the prevailing flood management techniques and their costs. Therefore, determining the ORP could be the start point for flood management planning. Once the ORP is determined, the short-term planning measures should consist of only those projects that match the long-term strategy of achieving ORP. Nevertheless, common established indicators can be used to assign the priorities to shortlisted projects using the BC ratio (recommended). However, extensive modeling efforts and analyses are required to determine the ORP. It is difficult to achieve the ORP immediately with limited resources. In that case, the flood FM ratio can be used to describe the extent of flood management in a standardized way for stepwise planning to obtain the ORP on a national level. The FM ratio guides us in identifying the present divergence from achieving the ORP within a floodplain. It is also important to mention here that, once established, the ORP must be re-evaluated periodically. The research presented here is among the initial attempts to develop a formal risk-based flood management standard that can be established on a nationwide basis.