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Edited by Katja Frieler, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany, and accepted by the Editorial Board March 25, 2015 (received for review August 13, 2014)
Significance
Understanding the vulnerability of societies around the world is crucial for understanding historical trends in flood risk and for producing accurate projections of fatalities and losses. We reproduced historical river flood occurrence using daily climate data for the period 1980–2010 and quantified the natural and socioeconomic contributions to flood risk trends. We show that the fatalities and losses as a share of the exposed population and gross domestic product are decreasing with rising income. We also show that there is a tendency of convergence in vulnerability levels between low- and high-income countries. Projections based on a wide range of climate change and socioeconomic development scenarios demonstrate that amplified adaptation efforts have the potential to largely contain losses from future floods.
Abstract
The global impacts of river floods are substantial and rising. Effective adaptation to the increasing risks requires an in-depth understanding of the physical and socioeconomic drivers of risk. Whereas the modeling of flood hazard and exposure has improved greatly, compelling evidence on spatiotemporal patterns in vulnerability of societies around the world is still lacking. Due to this knowledge gap, the effects of vulnerability on global flood risk are not fully understood, and future projections of fatalities and losses available today are based on simplistic assumptions or do not include vulnerability. We show for the first time (to our knowledge) that trends and fluctuations in vulnerability to river floods around the world can be estimated by dynamic high-resolution modeling of flood hazard and exposure. We find that rising per-capita income coincided with a global decline in vulnerability between 1980 and 2010, which is reflected in decreasing mortality and losses as a share of the people and gross domestic product exposed to inundation. The results also demonstrate that vulnerability levels in low- and high-income countries have been converging, due to a relatively strong trend of vulnerability reduction in developing countries. Finally, we present projections of flood losses and fatalities under 100 individual scenario and model combinations, and three possible global vulnerability scenarios. The projections emphasize that materialized flood risk largely results from human behavior and that future risk increases can be largely contained using effective disaster risk reduction strategies.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: brenden.jongman{at}vu.nl.
Author contributions: B.J., H.C.W., J.C.J.H.A., and P.J.W. designed research; B.J., H.C.W., and P.J.W. performed research; W.K. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; B.J., H.C.W., E.C.d.P., and P.J.W. analyzed data; and B.J., H.C.W., J.C.J.H.A., E.C.d.P., M.K.v.A., W.K., and P.J.W. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. K.F. is a Guest Editor invited by the Editorial Board.
Declining global vulnerability to floods
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