Design-criteria for flood-defences have a legal character in the Netherlands. Formerly, these flood protection standards were based on design-waterlevels, where a flood defence was implicitly supposed not to fail below this waterlevel. Since knowledge regarding dike-failure improved, a new risk approach has been developed based on a social cost-benefit analysis which addresses a monetary value to a (prevented) fatality. Also, loss of life is part of the risk analysis. The main improvement of the new approach is the explicit inclusion of failure probabilities in flood-risk calculations. A recent floodrisk study showed the risk of flooding for some regions in the Netherlands is larger than previously thought [Rijkswaterstaat 2015].