Global projections of river flood risk in a warmer world

By L. Alfieri, B. Bisselink, Francesco Dottori, Gustavo Naumann, A. Roo, Peter Salamon, K. Wyser, Luc Feyen. 2017

709 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rising global temperature has put increasing pressure on understanding the linkage between atmospheric warming and the occurrence of natural hazards. While the Paris Agreement has set the ambitious target to limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to preindustrial levels, scientists are urged to explore scenarios for different warming thresholds and quantify ranges of socioeconomic impact. In this work, we present a framework to estimate the economic damage and population affected by river floods at global scale. It is based on a modeling cascade involving hydrological, hydraulic and socioeconomic impact simulations, and makes use of state‐of‐the‐art global layers of hazard, exposure and vulnerability at 1‐km grid resolution. An ensemble of seven high‐resolution global climate projections based on Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 is used to derive streamflow simulations in the present and in the future climate. Those were analyzed to assess the frequency and magnitude of river floods and their impacts under scenarios corresponding to 1.5°C, 2°C, and 4°C global warming. Results indicate a clear positive correlation between atmospheric warming and future flood risk at global scale. At 4°C global warming, countries representing more than 70% of the global population and global gross domestic product will face increases in flood risk in excess of 500%. Changes in flood risk are unevenly distributed, with the largest increases in Asia, U.S., and Europe. In contrast, changes are statistically not significant in most countries in Africa and Oceania for all considered warming levels.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0aade87c05022a9470296b508c4c354234c55edd

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Water Science and Technology

Citations in the corpus

Global surface air temperatures in CMIP6: historical performance and future changes (2020, background): “Previous studies have suggested that the widespread temperature increases have substantial impacts on the global hydrologic cycle (Alfieri et al 2017, Sun and Miao 2018, Zheng et al 2019, Gou et al 2020), food production (Asseng et al 2015), energy allocation (Mcglade and Ekins 2015), disease…”
Multi-Model Projections of River Flood Risk in Europe under Global Warming (2018, methodology): “[20], hereafter referred to as JRC-EU, and the European component of two global scale applications [21,22], referred to as ISIMIP and JRC-GL respectively, designed to evaluate economic damages and population affected under specific warming levels (SWLs) of 1.”
Flood Detection and Susceptibility Mapping Using Sentinel-1 Remote Sensing Data and a Machine Learning Approach: Hybrid Intelligence of Bagging Ensemble Based on K-Nearest Neighbor Classifier (2020, background): “More than 20,000 lives are lost to flooding annually [9], and between 1995 and 2015, approximately 109 million people were impacted by the flood damage, with direct costs of USD 75 billion per year [10].”
Extreme heat waves under 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming (2018, background): “1 (Alfieri et al 2017), with spectral horizontal grid T511 (approximately 40 km at the equator) and 91 vertical levels.”