Abstract
Knowledge on the costs of natural disasters under climate change is key information for planning adaptation and mitigation strategies of future climate policies. Impact models for large scale flood risk assessment have made leaps forward in the past few years, thanks to the increased availability of high resolution climate projections and of information on local exposure and vulnerability to river floods. Yet, state-of-the-art flood impact models rely on a number of input data and techniques that can substantially influence their results. This work compares estimates of river flood risk in Europe from three recent case studies, assuming global warming scenarios of 1.5, 2, and 3 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. The assessment is based on comparing ensemble projections of expected damage and population affected at country level. Differences and common points between the three cases are shown, to point out main sources of uncertainty, strengths, and limitations. In addition, the multi-model comparison helps identify regions with the largest agreement on specific changes in flood risk. Results show that global warming is linked to substantial increase in flood risk over most countries in Central and Western Europe at all warming levels. In Eastern Europe, the average change in flood risk is smaller and the multi-model agreement is poorer.
Highlights
Floods are among the most costly natural disasters in Europe [1]
The time windows may differ significantly depending on the warming rate predicted by each climate forcing, though we found that the slightly different approaches to identify specific warming levels (SWLs) have a negligible effect on the resulting years of exceeding the SWLs across the three cases
JRC Europe (JRC-EU) and JRC Global (JRC-GL) used a peak over threshold (POT) approach that accounts for all flood events exceeding flood protections in any given place, potentially even more than one per year, while Impacts Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) considered only the annual maximum flood
Summary
Floods are among the most costly natural disasters in Europe [1]. Their impact has grown steadily in the past decades due to the increase of population and built-up areas. A large body of research addressing this topic has been produced in recent years These range from local case studies to national, continental, and some global-scale assessments based on modelling chains of variable complexity e.g., [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. While multi-model ensembles have been used to investigate climate impacts on variables such as river flows [13], water availability, and agricultural yields [16], studies including analyses of the reasons for observed model differences are rare. To address these questions, we compare the results of three state-of-the-art research studies that evaluate the socio-economic impact of river floods in Europe under climate change. The comparison is expected to shed light on the influence of the data applied and methods to assess impact projections
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