The experts stated that the structure of the ETA method is clear and provides great help when assessing flood countermeasures. ETA also helps in understanding the difference between the consequences of floods with shorter or longer duration.
Another benefit of the ETA was seen to be the possibility to count stakeholder-specific (direct) flood costs. Typical stake- holders are companies, authorities and households with their own interest in flood protection. More importantly, the experts pointed out that ETA provides adequate means to assess flood risk with respect to health and property although direct costs were focused on in the demonstration.
Even though the method was seen useful for all levels of decision making, it was agreed that the most appropriate level for an ETA is the strategic decision level, where consequences must comprehen- sively be taken into consideration for planned adaptation.
A challenge for using ETA in public decision-making is the fact that in larger cities decisionmaking is often distributed across several functional sectors. For instance, the transport sector makes decisions dealing with road construction and culverts, the waterworks take care of water distribution, and the electricity networks want to keep the distribution of electricity in service, whereas telecommunication companies want to keep up the data transmission network. It was noted that there is no governance mechanism that would coordinate flood protection initiatives across these sectors. On the other hand, a concerted ETA project may provide the means for sectoral coordination.