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Global economic response to river floods

Abstract

Increasing Earth’s surface air temperature yields an intensification of its hydrological cycle1. As a consequence, the risk of river floods will increase regionally within the next two decades due to the atmospheric warming caused by past anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions2,3,4. The direct economic losses5,6 caused by these floods can yield regionally heterogeneous losses and gains by propagation within the global trade and supply network7. Here we show that, in the absence of large-scale structural adaptation, the total economic losses due to fluvial floods will increase in the next 20 years globally by 17% despite partial compensation through market adjustment within the global trade network. China will suffer the strongest direct losses, with an increase of 82%. The United States is mostly affected indirectly through its trade relations. By contrast to the United States, recent intensification of the trade relations with China leaves the European Union better prepared for the import of production losses in the future.

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Fig. 1: Increase in economic losses due to fluvial floods in economically strong and populated areas.
Fig. 2: Losses and gains between 2016 and 2035.
Fig. 3: Losses propagated through trade relations for key regions.
Fig. 4: Temporal evolution for two different economic network constellations.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank F. Zhao for preparing the flood projections with CaMa-Flood, the working group around Y. Hirabayashi, and especially D. Yamazaki, for providing the MATSIRO return period to flood depth mapping data. This research has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 (grant agreement 603864), from the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union (grant agreement 641811), from the framework of the Leibniz Competition (SAW-2013-PIK-5) and from the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate, as well as from the Center for Climate and Life of Columbia University, New York, New York.

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All authors designed the research. S.W. and C.O. developed the loss-propagation model. S.W. and A.L. conducted the analysis. All authors discussed the analysis and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Anders Levermann.

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Supplementary Figures 1–5, Supplementary Table 1

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Willner, S.N., Otto, C. & Levermann, A. Global economic response to river floods. Nature Clim Change 8, 594–598 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0173-2

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