Multiform flood risk in a rapidly changing world: what we do not do, what we should and why it matters

Abstract

Abstract There is an urgent need to raise awareness of the risks for generalizing ‘flood’ within the development of new risk assessment framework and adaptation strategies, and further outline opportunities for ensuring current and future multiform flood risk can be both assessed and reduced in particular for the most vulnerable populations. This requires enhancing modelling capabilities to embed the different yet interlinked dimensions of subtypes of climate shocks and their feedbacks. As we continue to see an increase in occurrence of compound risk, the importance of flood type specificity will grow, especially as areas experience certain types of floods for the first time. In this perspective we review current efforts to integrate flood risk within public and private sectors across the hazard modelling, financial and macroeconomic and humanitarian communities. We argue that while there are ongoing efforts in compound risk assessment, compound risk financing and compound risk anticipatory action, they remain almost exclusively focused on compounding of a primary disaster type, and fail to highlight the important differences of ‘subtypes’ of events (which from an impact profile perspective, can be as different as primary types). We then provide recommendations for developing climate change-responsive risk assessment methods and risk mitigation policy for multiform flood events.