The land behind levees might be far from flood-free, but that doesn’t mean those living there should be required to purchase flood insurance—not because flood insurance isn’t a good idea, but because the level of risk is mercurial and compliance is spotty anyway.

Instead, the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs to look at new ways to determine and communicate individual risk, a recently released National Academies report states. The report, Levees and the National Flood Insurance Program: Improving Policies and Practices, examines how the National Flood Insurance Program should handle the floodplains behind accredited levees that don’t meet 100-year flood protection standards.

The report was commissioned by FEMA when flood map modernization revealed that a number of levees weren’t meeting the 100-year standards, according to a statement. Rather than considering these areas unprotected (and therefore required to purchase mandatory flood insurance), the agency asked report authors to look into other options.

“The whole idea that a levee is good or bad because water will or will not go over its top belies integrity issues, failure of structures, or whether gates will be left open,” Gerald Galloway, a research professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland and lead author of the report, told the Times-Picayune.

With that in mind, report authors recommend using “computational and mapping techniques” to create risk estimates for all flood prone areas, accredited or not.

“It would assess how well levee systems are likely to perform, taking into account the probabilities that the many components of a system will function as designed,” according to the statement. “Such an approach would give individual property owners a more accurate view of the risks they face and inform communities of their levee systems' limits and potential vulnerabilities. It would also be able to account for any partial protection offered by non-accredited levees.”

Before that can happen, though, the National Academies states, FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will need to get a clear picture of both the levees under their purviews and what lies behind them—a task flood managers have said was needed for years.

Once completed though, the end result could be a true boon to communities—more properties adequately insured and in an actuarially sound manner.

“Property owners would be more favorably inclined to buy flood insurance if individual risk is well-known, understood, and insurance rates are priced to match the probability of flooding and financial impact of flooding events,” the report stated.