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Five centuries of human observation reveal Europe’s flood history

Europe’s rich heritage of historical documents has been used to reconstruct the flooding history of the continent for the past five centuries. This could help policymakers to develop flood-management strategies for the future.
  1. Francis Ludlow

    1. Francis Ludlow is at the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College, Dublin D02 PN40, Ireland.

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  2. Rhonda McGovern

    1. Rhonda McGovern is at the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College, Dublin D02 PN40, Ireland.

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In a paper in Nature, Blöschl et al.1 capitalize on a vast assembly of written historical observations to provide a history of flooding for 103 major European river reaches between ad 1500 and 2016. In doing so, they reveal nine flood-rich periods that affected extensive regions in distinct areas of Europe — and find that the most recent of these periods, which might not yet be over, differs in key respects from the others.

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Nature 583, 522-524 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02138-2

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 06 August 2020: An earlier version of this News & Views article erroneously stated that the average yearly costs of flooding in Europe between 1870 and 2016 were 0.8–0.9% of gross domestic product.

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