Role of dams in reducing global flood exposure under climate change

Julien Boulange (), Naota Hanasaki, Dai Yamazaki and Yadu Pokhrel
Additional contact information
Julien Boulange: National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES)
Naota Hanasaki: National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES)
Dai Yamazaki: The University of Tokyo
Yadu Pokhrel: Michigan State University

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Globally, flood risk is projected to increase in the future due to climate change and population growth. Here, we quantify the role of dams in flood mitigation, previously unaccounted for in global flood studies, by simulating the floodplain dynamics and flow regulation by dams. We show that, ignoring flow regulation by dams, the average number of people exposed to flooding below dams amount to 9.1 and 15.3 million per year, by the end of the 21st century (holding population constant), for the representative concentration pathway (RCP) 2.6 and 6.0, respectively. Accounting for dams reduces the number of people exposed to floods by 20.6 and 12.9% (for RCP2.6 and RCP6.0, respectively). While environmental problems caused by dams warrant further investigations, our results indicate that consideration of dams significantly affect the estimation of future population exposure to flood, emphasizing the need to integrate them in model-based impact analysis of climate change.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20704-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-20704-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20704-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().