IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/natcom/v12y2021i1d10.1038_s41467-021-22153-9.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Climate signals in river flood damages emerge under sound regional disaggregation

Author

Listed:
  • Inga J. Sauer

    (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
    ETH Zurich)

  • Ronja Reese

    (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)

  • Christian Otto

    (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)

  • Tobias Geiger

    (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
    Climate and Environment Consultancy)

  • Sven N. Willner

    (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)

  • Benoit P. Guillod

    (ETH Zurich
    ETH Zurich)

  • David N. Bresch

    (ETH Zurich
    Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss)

  • Katja Frieler

    (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)

Abstract

Climate change affects precipitation patterns. Here, we investigate whether its signals are already detectable in reported river flood damages. We develop an empirical model to reconstruct observed damages and quantify the contributions of climate and socio-economic drivers to observed trends. We show that, on the level of nine world regions, trends in damages are dominated by increasing exposure and modulated by changes in vulnerability, while climate-induced trends are comparably small and mostly statistically insignificant, with the exception of South & Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Asia. However, when disaggregating the world regions into subregions based on river-basins with homogenous historical discharge trends, climate contributions to damages become statistically significant globally, in Asia and Latin America. In most regions, we find monotonous climate-induced damage trends but more years of observations would be needed to distinguish between the impacts of anthropogenic climate forcing and multidecadal oscillations.

Suggested Citation

  • Inga J. Sauer & Ronja Reese & Christian Otto & Tobias Geiger & Sven N. Willner & Benoit P. Guillod & David N. Bresch & Katja Frieler, 2021. "Climate signals in river flood damages emerge under sound regional disaggregation," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 12(1), pages 1-11, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-22153-9
    DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22153-9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22153-9
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/s41467-021-22153-9?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mühlhofer, Evelyn & Koks, Elco E. & Kropf, Chahan M. & Sansavini, Giovanni & Bresch, David N., 2023. "A generalized natural hazard risk modelling framework for infrastructure failure cascades," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 234(C).
    2. Julien Boulange & Yukiko Hirabayashi & Masahiro Tanoue & Toshinori Yamada, 2023. "Quantitative evaluation of flood damage methodologies under a portfolio of adaptation scenarios," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 118(3), pages 1855-1879, September.
    3. Samuel Lüthi & Christopher Fairless & Erich M. Fischer & Noah Scovronick & Armstrong & Micheline De Sousa Zanotti Stagliorio Coelho & Yue Leon Guo & Yuming Guo & Yasushi Honda & Veronika Huber & Jan K, 2023. "Rapid increase in the risk of heat-related mortality," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-10, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-22153-9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.