Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Residual flood damage under intensive adaptation

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 823–826 (2021)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

The risk of river flooding is expected to increase with climate change and socioeconomic development, and therefore additional protection measures are required to reduce the potential for increased flood damage. While studies have investigated the effectiveness of adaptation measures to reduce flood risks, none has evaluated residual flood damage (RFD), which reflects the projected increase in damage under intensive adaptation. Here we evaluate RFD under several adaptation objectives using an inundation model incorporating damage estimates and a cost–benefit analysis, and estimate that China, India and Latin American countries can achieve higher levels of flood protection that will reduce RFD even under extreme scenarios. However, a high RFD (exceeding 0.1% of subnational administrative gross domestic product) remains, especially in eastern China, northern India and central Africa. RFD could be reduced with shorter construction periods or lower adaptation costs, implying the need for immediate and appropriate adaptation actions, including enhanced financial support for high-risk regions.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Future flood protection levels for the optimized adaption objective.
Fig. 2: RFD as a proportion of the subnational administrative GDP for the optimized adaptation objective.
Fig. 3: Probability of high RFD (>0.05% of the subnational administrative GDP) in all scenarios.

Data availability

Data generated and analysed during this study are available for research purposes at http://www.db.shibaura-it.ac.jp/~hirabayashi/research/Tanoue2021NCC. The S14 forcing dataset is from https://h08.nies.go.jp/s14/. The MATSIRO is downloadable from a password-protected CVS repository held by The University of Tokyo on request. The CaMa-Flood is from http://hydro.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yamadai/cama-flood/. The GRUPM population distribution and national mask are from https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/grump-v1. The future GDP per capita are from https://secure.iiasa.ac.at/web-apps/ene/SspDb/dsd?Action=htmlpage&page=welcome. Additional datasets used for the modelling are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Code availability

The code used for the modelling framework is available at http://www.db.shibaura-it.ac.jp/~hirabayashi/research/Tanoue2021NCC.

References

  1. Arnell, N. W. & Lloyd-Hughes, B. The global-scale impacts of climate change on water resources and flooding under new climate and socio-economic scenarios. Clim. Change 122, 127–140 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Hirabayashi, Y. et al. Global flood risk under climate change. Nat. Clim. Change 3, 816–821 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Winsemius, H. C. et al. Global drivers of future river flood risk. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 381–385 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Alfieri, L. et al. Global projections of river flood risk in a warmer world. Earth’s Future 5, 171–182 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Alfieri, L., Dottori, F., Betts, R., Salamon, P. & Feyen, L. Multi-model projections of river flood risk in Europe under global warming. Climate 6, https://doi.org/10.3390/cli6010006 (2018)

  6. Kinoshita, Y., Tanoue, M., Watanabe, S. & Hirabayashi, Y. Quantifying the effect of autonomous adaptation to global river flood projections: application to future flood risk assessments. Environ. Res. Lett. 13, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa9401 (2018)

  7. Jongman, B. et al. Increasing stress on disaster-risk finance due to large floods. Nat. Clim. Change 4, 264–268 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Ward, P. J. et al. A global framework for future costs and benefits of river-flood protection in urban areas. Nat. Clim. Change 7, 642–646 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Scussolini, P. et al. FLOPROS: an evolving global database of flood protection standards. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 16, 1049–1061 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Kind, J. M. Economically efficient flood protection standards for the Netherlands. J. Flood Risk Manag. 7, 103–117 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Hirabayashi, Y., Tanoue, M., Sasaki, O., Zhou, X. & Yamazaki, D. Global exposure to flooding from the new CMIP6 climate model projections. Sci. Rep. 11, 3740 (2021).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Tanoue, M. et al. Estimation of direct and indirect economic losses caused by a flood with long-lasting inundation: application to the 2011 Thailand flood. Water Resour. Res. 56, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019wr026092 (2020)

  13. Ciscar, J. C. et al. Physical and economic consequences of climate change in Europe. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 2678–2683 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. Koks, E. E., Bockarjova, M., de Moel, H. & Aerts, J. C. Integrated direct and indirect flood risk modeling: development and sensitivity analysis. Risk Anal. 35, 882–900 (2015).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Koks, E. E. et al. The macroeconomic impacts of future river flooding in Europe. Environ. Res. Lett. 14, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab3306 (2019).

  16. Willner, S. N., Otto, C. & Levermann, A. Global economic response to river floods. Nat. Clim. Change 8, 594–598 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Dottori, F. et al. Increased human and economic losses from river flooding with anthropogenic warming. Nat. Clim. Change 8, 781–786 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Di Baldassarre, G. et al. Socio-hydrology: conceptualising human–flood interactions. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 17, 3295–3303 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. White, G. Human Adjustment to Floods (University of Chicago Press, 1945).

  20. Munoz, S. E. et al. Climatic control of Mississippi River flood hazard amplified by river engineering. Nature 556, 95–98 (2018).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  21. Tanoue, M., Hirabayashi, Y. & Ikeuchi, H. Global-scale river flood vulnerability in the last 50 years. Sci. Rep. 6, 36021 (2016).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  22. Jongman, B. et al. Declining vulnerability to river floods and the global benefits of adaptation. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, E2271–E2280 (2015).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  23. Yamazaki, D., Kanae, S., Kim, H. & Oki, T. A physically based description of floodplain inundation dynamics in a global river routing model. Water Resour. Res. 47, https://doi.org/10.1029/2010wr009726 (2011)

  24. Iizumi, T., Takikawa, H., Hirabayashi, Y., Hanasaki, N. & Nishimori, M. Contributions of different bias-correction methods and reference meteorological forcing data sets to uncertainty in projected temperature and precipitation extremes. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 122, 7800–7819 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Yamazaki, D., Sato, T., Kanae, S., Hirabayashi, Y. & Bates, P. D. Regional flood dynamics in a bifurcating mega delta simulated in a global river model. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 3127–3135 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Ikeuchi, H. et al. Modeling complex flow dynamics of fluvial floods exacerbated by sea level rise in the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna Delta. Environ. Res. Lett. 10, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/124011 (2015)

  27. Hosking, J. R. M. & Wallis, J. R. Regional Frequency Analysis: An Approach Based on L-moments (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  28. Huizinga, J., Moel, H. D. & Szewczyk, W. Global Flood Depth‐Damage Functions: Methodology and the Database with Guidelines (Joint Research Centre, 2017).

  29. Willner, S. N., Levermann, A., Zhao, F. & Frieler, K. Adaptation required to preserve future high-end river flood risk at present levels. Sci. Adv. 4, eaao1914 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Arnell, N. W. et al. A global assessment of the effects of climate policy on the impacts of climate change. Nat. Clim. Change 3, 512–519 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Aerts, J. A Review of cost estimates for flood adaptation. Water 10, https://doi.org/10.3390/w10111646 (2018)

  32. Lenk, S., Rybski, D., Heidrich, O., Dawson, R. J. & Kropp, J. P. Costs of sea dikes—regressions and uncertainty estimates. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 17, 765–779 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Jones, B. & O’Neill, B. C. Spatially explicit global population scenarios consistent with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Environ. Res. Lett. 11, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084003 (2016).

  34. United Nations Demographic Yearbook (United Nations, 2005).

  35. United Nations Demographic Yearbook (United Nations, 2008).

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (JPMEERF20202005) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan, a JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (18H01540), the Integrated Research Program for Advancing Climate Models (TOUGOU) (JPMXD0717935457) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan and MS&AD InterRisk Research & Consulting, Inc. The authors are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments, which helped to improve the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Earth System Division, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Ibaraki, Japan

    Masahiro Tanoue

  2. Graduate School of Engineering and Science, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Masahiro Tanoue, Haireti Alifu & Yukiko Hirabayashi

  3. Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Ryo Taguchi

Authors
  1. Masahiro Tanoue
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Ryo Taguchi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Haireti Alifu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Yukiko Hirabayashi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

M.T. developed the database, designed the modelling framework, conducted the analysis and made the figures. M.T. and Y.H. contributed to the analysis of results. R.T., H.A. and M.T. performed the inundation model simulations. M.T. and Y.H. wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Masahiro Tanoue.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Daniel Eisenberg and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–18 and Tables 1–8.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Tanoue, M., Taguchi, R., Alifu, H. et al. Residual flood damage under intensive adaptation. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 823–826 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01158-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01158-8

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing