Climate signals in river flood damages emerge under sound regional disaggregation

Inga J. Sauer, Ronja Reese, Christian Otto (), Tobias Geiger, Sven N. Willner, Benoit P. Guillod, David N. Bresch and Katja Frieler ()
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Inga J. Sauer: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Ronja Reese: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Christian Otto: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Tobias Geiger: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Sven N. Willner: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Benoit P. Guillod: ETH Zurich
David N. Bresch: ETH Zurich
Katja Frieler: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22153-9

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