Print Email Facebook Twitter Trends in flood losses in Europe over the past 150 years Title Trends in flood losses in Europe over the past 150 years Author Paprotny, D. (TU Delft Hydraulic Structures and Flood Risk; Joint Research Centre (JRC)) Sebastian, Antonia (TU Delft Hydraulic Structures and Flood Risk; Rice University) Morales Napoles, O. (TU Delft Hydraulic Structures and Flood Risk) Jonkman, Sebastiaan N. (TU Delft Hydraulic Structures and Flood Risk) Date 2018-05-29 Abstract Adverse consequences of floods change in time and are influenced by both natural and socio-economic trends and interactions. In Europe, previous studies of historical flood losses corrected for demographic and economic growth (‘normalized’) have been limited in temporal and spatial extent, leading to an incomplete representation of trends in losses over time. Here we utilize a gridded reconstruction of flood exposure in 37 European countries and a new database of damaging floods since 1870. Our results indicate that, after correcting for changes in flood exposure, there has been an increase in annually inundated area and number of persons affected since 1870, contrasted by a substantial decrease in flood fatalities. For more recent decades we also found a considerable decline in financial losses per year. We estimate, however, that there is large underreporting of smaller floods beyond most recent years, and show that underreporting has a substantial impact on observed trends. Subject OA-Fund TU Delft To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0bff01d8-1463-4e0e-be3a-c6cef5ec3e70 DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04253-1 ISSN 2041-1723 Source Nature Communications, 9 (1) Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2018 D. Paprotny, Antonia Sebastian, O. Morales Napoles, Sebastiaan N. Jonkman Files PDF s41467_018_04253_1.pdf 2.86 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:0bff01d8-1463-4e0e-be3a-c6cef5ec3e70/datastream/OBJ/view