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Journal Article

Climate signals in river flood damages emerge under sound regional disaggregation

Authors
/persons/resource/inga.sauer

Sauer,  Inga
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

/persons/resource/Ronja.Reese

Reese,  Ronja
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

/persons/resource/christian.otto

Otto,  Christian
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

/persons/resource/geiger

Geiger,  Tobias
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

/persons/resource/sven.willner

Willner,  Sven
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

Guillod,  Benoit P.
External Organizations;

Bresch,  David N.
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/Katja.Frieler

Frieler,  Katja
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

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Fulltext (public)

25078oa.pdf
(Publisher version), 3MB

Supplementary Material (public)
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Citation

Sauer, I., Reese, R., Otto, C., Geiger, T., Willner, S., Guillod, B. P., Bresch, D. N., Frieler, K. (2021): Climate signals in river flood damages emerge under sound regional disaggregation. - Nature Communications, 12, 2128.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22153-9


Cite as: https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_25078
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.