Most structural and some nonstructural water projects require significant sunk costs and lead to uncertain economic and ecological outcomes. For instance, building irrigation or flood control dam requires sizable sunk cost, an investment that is difficult to recover later. The dam faces uncertainties in terms of future rainfall, the performance of the dam’s structures and downstream levees, the...

Conventionally flood mapping typically includes only a static water level (e.g. peak of a storm tide) in coastal flood inundation events. Additional factors become increasingly important when increased water-level thresholds are met during the combination of a storm tide and increased mean sea level. This research incorporates factors such as wave overtopping and river flow in a range of flood ...

Floods have profound impacts on populations worldwide in terms of both loss of life and property. A global inventory of floods is an important tool for quantifying the spatial and temporal distribution of floods and for evaluating global flood prediction models. Several global hazard inventories currently exist; however, their utility for spatiotemporal analysis of global floods is limited. The...

The flood governance of Huaihe River has a long history. Especially after the establishment of New China, the state has invested huge funds in water conservancy projects, but the problem of Huaihe River flood has not been fundamentally solved. On the basis of previous studies, the reasons for the Huaihe River flood, among which the root causes of the Huaihe River floods are the poor access of t...

In recent years, the United States has been severely affected by numerous tropical cyclones (TCs) which have caused massive damages. While media attention mainly focuses on coastal losses from storm surge, these TCs have inflicted significant devastation inland as well. Yet, little is known about the relationship between TC-related inland flooding and economic losses. Here we introduce a novel ...

This paper proposes a methodology to project the possible evolution of river flood damages due to climate change, and applies it to mainland France. Its main contributions are (i) to demonstrate a methodology to investigate the full causal chain from global climate change to local economic flood losses; (ii) to show that future flood losses may change in a very significant manner over France; (...

Losses from environmental flood hazards have escalated in recent decades, prompting a reorientation of emergency management systems away from simple post event response. There is a noticeable change in policy, with more emphasis on loss reduction through mitigation, preparedness, and recovery projects and programs. Effective mitigation of losses from flood hazards requires hazard identification...

BACKGROUND Natural disasters have severe impacts on the health and well-being of affected households. However, we find evidence that official damage cost assessments for floods and other natural disasters in Vietnam, where households have little or no insurance, clearly underestimate the total economic damage costs of these events as they do not include the welfare loss from mortality, morbidit...