Assessing flood risk at the global scale: model setup, results, and sensitivity

By Philip J. Ward, Brenden Jongman, F. Weiland, A. Bouwman, Rens van Beek, Marc F. P. Bierkens, W. Ligtvoet, Hessel Winsemius. 2013

405 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Globally, economic losses from flooding exceeded $19 billion in 2012, and are rising rapidly. Hence, there is an increasing need for global-scale flood risk assessments, also within the context of integrated global assessments. We have developed and validated a model cascade for producing global flood risk maps, based on numerous flood return-periods. Validation results indicate that the model simulates interannual fluctuations in flood impacts well. The cascade involves: hydrological and hydraulic modelling; extreme value statistics; inundation modelling; flood impact modelling; and estimating annual expected impacts. The initial results estimate global impacts for several indicators, for example annual expected exposed population (169 million); and annual expected exposed GDP ($1383 billion). These results are relatively insensitive to the extreme value distribution employed to estimate low frequency flood volumes. However, they are extremely sensitive to the assumed flood protection standard; developing a database of such standards should be a research priority. Also, results are sensitive to the use of two different climate forcing datasets. The impact model can easily accommodate new, user-defined, impact indicators. We envisage several applications, for example: identifying risk hotspots; calculating macro-scale risk for the insurance industry and large companies; and assessing potential benefits (and costs) of adaptation measures.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27a70ab3ba5a0f7711acfeae906160bf2e73b730

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Citations in the corpus

PCR-GLOBWB 2: a 5 arcmin global hydrological and water resources model (2017, background): “…2013; Wanders et al., 2015; Wanders and Wada, 2016), current and future flood hazard and risk (Pappenberger et al., 2012; Hirabayashi et al., 2013; Ward et al., 2013; Winsemius et al., 2013, 2016), global groundwater depletion (Wada et al., 2010; Gleeson et al., 2012), the contribution of…”
The safe development paradox: An agent-based model for flood risk under climate change in the European Union (2020, methodology): “The latter variable describes the relation between inundation depth and damage to the value of exposure (de Moel et al., 2015; Merz et al., 2010; Ward et al., 2013).”
The Monetary Benefit of Early Flood Warnings in Europe (2015, neutral): “…wider drive to implement early warning systems at the continental or global scale to improve our resilience to natural hazards in a changing climate (Alﬁeri et al., 2013; De Groeve et al., 2014; Merz et al., 2014; Pappenberger et al., 2012, 2013; Ward et al., 2013, 2014; Winsemius et al., 2013).”
Disaster risk, climate change, and poverty: assessing the global exposure of poor people to floods and droughts (2015, background): “(2013) and applied at the global scale in several studies (Ward et al., 2013; Jongman et al., 2015; Winsemius et al., 2015a).”