Population, land use and economic exposure estimates for Europe at 100 m resolution from 1870 to 2020

Paprotny, Dominik; Mengel, Matthias

doi:10.1038/s41597-023-02282-0

Cited by 14 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…The flood loss survey data for companies are distributed via the German flood damage database HOWAS21 under a community‐based use concept (GFZ, 2021). Economic data (GDP and assets values) are contained in the HANZE data set (Paprotny, Morales‐Nápoles, & Jonkman, 2018) and its updated version (Paprotny, 2023; Paprotny & Mengel, 2023). The remaining data were shared with the authors upon request by the data owners; that is, the inundation maps by the Environmental Agency of the city of Dresden (Nuremberg Institute of Technology, 2019), the water level time series by the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (WSV, 2021), the historical land use maps by the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (Gruner, 2012), and the flood loss records at the municipal level by the Saxonian Relief Bank (SAB, 2007).…”

Section: Data Availability Statementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Projecting Flood Risk Dynamics for Effective Long‐Term Adaptation

Schoppa,

Barendrecht,

Paprotny

et al. 2024

Earth's Future

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Flood losses have steadily increased in the past and are expected to grow even further owing to climate and socioeconomic change. The reduction of flood vulnerability, for example, through adaptation, plays a key role in the mitigation of future flood risk. However, lacking knowledge about vulnerability dynamics, which arise from the interaction between floods and the ensuing response by society, limits the scope of current risk projections. We present a socio‐hydrological method for flood risk assessment that simulates the interaction between society and flooding continuously, including changes in vulnerability through collective (structural) and private (non structural) measures. Our probabilistic approach quantifies uncertainties and exploits empirical data to chart risk dynamics including how society copes with flooding. In a case study for the commercial sector in Dresden, Germany, we show that increased adaptation is necessary to counteract the expected four‐fold growth in flood risk due to transient hydroclimatic and socioeconomic boundary conditions. We further use our holistic approach to identify solutions for effective long‐term adaptation, demonstrating that integrated adaptation strategies (i.e., combined structural and non structural measures) can reduce the average risk by up to 60% at the study site. Ultimately, our case study highlights the benefit of the model for robust flood risk assessment as it can capture unintended, adverse feedbacks of adaptation measures such as the levee effect. Consequently, our socio‐hydrological method contributes to a more systemic and reliable flood risk assessment that can inform adaptation planning by exploring the possible system evolutions comprehensively including unlikely futures.

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Section: Data Availability Statementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Projecting Flood Risk Dynamics for Effective Long‐Term Adaptation

Schoppa,

Barendrecht,

Paprotny

et al. 2024

Earth's Future

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“…Subnational regions (hereafter, "region") are administrative or statistical divisions of countries in the study area that are, except for minor exceptions, consistent with the European Union's Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, level 3, version 2010 (Eurostat, 2020). There are 1422 regions defined in the study area, described in detail in Paprotny and Mengel (2023)). Both historical and modelled flood footprints are considered at this resolution, as well as the predicted protection levels.…”

Section: Flood Event Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Flood risk, potential flood impact and hydrological intensity is taken from the modelled flood catalogue of Paprotny et al (2024). Economic development and structure, land use and population size were all taken from the HANZE exposure dataset (Paprotny and Mengel, 2023). Governance indicators were all taken from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset, v13 (Coppedge et al, 2023), and demographic indicators from the 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects (United Nations, 2022).…”

Section: Predictorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Absolute modelled flood impacts for 1504 historical floods between 1950 and 2020 are compared with reported losses for the same events, where available (as indicated in Table 1). This enables comparing the performance of the model in reproducing historical time series of losses, even though this depends not only the accuracy of the vulnerability models of this study, but also the hazard and exposure reconstructions of Paprotny and Mengel (2023); Paprotny et al (2024).…”

Section: Absolute Impacts and Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study, we present a novel approach to estimate present and past variation in flood protection and vulnerability in Europe based on combination of modelled and reported impacts of floods. We build upon recent advances in pan-European riverine and coastal flood modelling (Paprotny et al, 2024;Tilloy et al, 2024), historical exposure estimation (Paprotny and Mengel, 2023), and collection of impact data from documentary sources . We utilize data spanning from 1950 to 2020 to create a multivariate model that is able to predict the spatial and temporal variation in flood occurrence and their impacts (fatalities, population affected, direct economic loss).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evolution of flood protection levels and flood vulnerability in Europe since 1950 estimated with vine-copula models

Paprotny,

Hart,

Napoles

2024

Preprint

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The magnitude of flood losses is regulated not only by hydrometeorological hazard and exposure, but also flood protection levels (primarily from structural flood defenses) and vulnerability (relative loss at given intensity of hazard). Here, we infer the variation of both factors from data on historical riverine, coastal and compound floods and their impacts in 42 European countries over the period 1950–2020 obtained from the HANZE database. We contrast actual damaging floods, which imply flood protection was locally inadequate, with modelled potential floods, i.e. events that were hydrologically extreme but did not lead to significant impacts, which imply that flood protection was sufficient to prevent losses. Further, we compare the reported magnitude of impacts (fatalities, population affected, and economic losses) with potential impacts computed with a uniform, static approach. We finally derive the spatial and temporal drivers of both flood protection and vulnerability through a multivariate statistical analysis. We apply vine-copulas to derive the best predictors out of a long list of candidate variables, including hydrological parameters of floods, exposure to floods, socioeconomic development, and governance indicators. Our results show that flood protection improved since 1950, particularly for coastal floods. However, riverine protection levels are shown to be much lower than assumed in previous pan-European studies. A strong decline in flood vulnerability over time is also observed for all three indicators of relative losses, suggesting improved flood adaptation. However, there are very large variations in both flood protection and vulnerability between subnational regions in Europe.

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Challenges in the attribution of river flood events

Scussolini,

Luu,

Philip

et al. 2023

WIREs Climate Change

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Advances in the field of extreme event attribution allow to estimate how anthropogenic global warming affects the odds of individual climate disasters, such as river floods. Extreme event attribution typically uses precipitation as proxy for flooding. However, hydrological processes and antecedent conditions make the relation between precipitation and floods highly nonlinear. In addition, hydrology acknowledges that changes in floods can be strongly driven by changes in land‐cover and by other human interventions in the hydrological system, such as irrigation and construction of dams. These drivers can either amplify, dampen or outweigh the effect of climate change on local flood occurrence. Neglecting these processes and drivers can lead to incorrect flood attribution. Including flooding explicitly, that is, using data and models of hydrology and hydrodynamics that can represent the relevant hydrological processes, will lead to more robust event attribution, and will account for the role of other drivers beyond climate change. Existing attempts are incomplete. We argue that the existing probabilistic framework for extreme event attribution can be extended to explicitly include floods for near‐natural cases, where flood occurrence was unlikely to be influenced by land‐cover change and human hydrological interventions. However, for the many cases where this assumption is not valid, a multi‐driver framework for conditional event attribution needs to be established. Explicit flood attribution will have to grapple with uncertainties from lack of observations and compounding from the many processes involved. Further, it requires collaboration between climatologists and hydrologists, and promises to better address the needs of flood risk management.This article is categorized under: Paleoclimates and Current Trends > Modern Climate Change Paleoclimates and Current Trends > Detection and Attribution Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Observed Impacts of Climate Change

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Population, land use and economic exposure estimates for Europe at 100 m resolution from 1870 to 2020

Cited by 14 publications

References 55 publications

Projecting Flood Risk Dynamics for Effective Long‐Term Adaptation

Projecting Flood Risk Dynamics for Effective Long‐Term Adaptation

Evolution of flood protection levels and flood vulnerability in Europe since 1950 estimated with vine-copula models

Challenges in the attribution of river flood events

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