Preface: climate change proof flood risk management

Abstract

It is widely being recognized that climate change is happening. Anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases cause warming of the atmosphere and oceans. The resulting changes in the climate system and water cycle are unequivocal and manifest themselves in sea level rise and an increasing likelihood of extreme weather worldwide, evidenced by the increasing frequency of occurrence of hurricanes, tornados, extreme rainfall and heat waves. Moreover, these extreme events affect more and more people and have increasingly larger economic consequences due to demographic and economic developments, because there is a massive migration towards river floodplains, deltas and coastal plains as these provide the largest opportunities for economic development. The records of flood- and drought-related disasters in the past decades leave no doubt about the combined consequences of these geo-ecological and socio-economic developments; disaster risk increases. Mitigation of and adaptation to climate change are complementary strategies for reducing and managing the risks related to climate change. Effective global climate change mitigation is urgently needed and may also be the most efficient strategy as demonstrated by Stern (2006), but it is not in sight yet. Despite all the international policy efforts (including 20 annual conferences of parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, gathering more than 10,000 participants each), emissions and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have been growing to unprecedented levels. Mitigation would depend on concerted global action of large players such as China and the USA, the countries with the largest carbon dioxide