Understanding global future river flood risk is a prerequisite for the quantification of climate change impacts and planning e ective adaptation strategies 1. Existing global flood risk projections fail to integrate the combined dynamics of expected socioeconomic development and climate change. We present the first global future river flood risk projections that separate the impacts of climate change and socioeconomic development. The projections are based on an ensemble of climate model outputs 2 , socioeconomic scenarios 3 , and a state-of-the-art hydrologic river flood model combined with socioeconomic impact models 4,5. Globally, absolute damage may increase by up to a factor of 20 by the end of the century without action. Countries in Southeast Asia face a severe increase in flood risk. Although climate change contributes significantly to the increase in risk in Southeast Asia 6 , we show that it is dwarfed by the e ect of socioeconomic growth, even after normalization for gross domestic product (GDP) growth. African countries face a strong increase in risk mainly due to socioeconomic change. However, when normalized to GDP, climate change becomes by far the strongest driver. Both highand low-income countries may benefit greatly from investing in adaptation measures, for which our analysis provides a basis. Between 1980 and 2013, the global direct economic losses due to floods exceeded $1 trillion (2013 values), and more than 220,000 people lost their lives 7. Global flood damages have been increasing steeply over the past decades, so far mainly driven by steady growth in population and economic activities in flood-prone areas 8,9. Future increases in flood frequency and severity due to changes in extreme weather are expected 1,9. Such increasing trends in flood risk may have severe direct humanitarian and economic impacts and lasting long-term negative effects on economic growth 10,11. In 2015, several major international policies are being initiated or renewed that may catalyse flood risk adaptation and hence risk reduction, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, Conference of the Parties (COP) 21, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Such efforts require global understanding of the drivers of flood risk change in the future. Past efforts to enhance this understanding have focused on the global-scale mapping of present-day flood hazard 12,13 and risk 4,5 and future changes in global flood exposure and risk 14 due to either climate change 6,15,16 or socioeconomic development 8,17. One recent study 18 combined global socioeconomic and climate change into future global flood risk projections for the first time, however, this work did not reveal regional patterns nor quantify the drivers of risk change. Furthermore, no study has so far accounted for installed and maintained flood protection standards (FPS; ref. 10).

Abstract. Forested tropical peatlands in Southeast Asia store at least 42 000 Million metric tonnes (Mt) of soil carbon. Human activity and climate change threatens the stability of this large pool, which has been decreasing rapidly over the last few decades owing to deforestation, drainage and fire. In this paper we estimate the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions resulting from drainage of lowland tropical peatland for agricultural and forestry development which dominates the perturbation of the carbon balance in the region. Present and future emissions from drained peatlands are quantified using data on peatland extent and peat thickness, present and projected land use, water management practices and decomposition rates. Of the 27

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