Title: Trends in European flood risk over the past 150 years,
Abstract: Flood risk changes in time and is influenced by both natural and
socio-economic trends and interactions. In Europe, previous studies of
historical flood losses corrected for demographic and economic growth
("normalized") have been limited in temporal and spatial extent, leading to an
incomplete representation in trends of losses over time. In this study we
utilize a gridded reconstruction of flood exposure in 37 European countries and
a new database of damaging floods since 1870. Our results indicate that since
1870 there has been an increase in annually inundated area and number of
persons affected, contrasted by a substantial decrease in flood fatalities,
after correcting for change in flood exposure. For more recent decades we also
found a considerable decline in financial losses per year. We estimate,
however, that there is large underreporting of smaller floods beyond most
recent years, and show that underreporting has a substantial impact on observed
trends.