Flood mortality in SE Asia: Can palaeo‐historical information help save lives?

Abstract

Asia is one of the world's most flood-prone regions by many metrics: high flood magnitudes, frequency, severity; the number countries affected, the area of inundation; the number of people at risk; and importantly, flood-related fatalities (AIR, 2014; Luo, Maddoks, Iceland, Ward, & Winsemius, 2015; Table 1). With respect to mortality, nearly all the countries with more than 5,000 flood-related deaths since 1985 are from Asia (11 of 13; Table 1; Figure 1). As we write this commentary, flooding associated with tropical storm Nangka has caused more than 40 deaths in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (Floodlist, 2020).

Time to Use Dendrohydrological Data in Water Resources Management?

“…A clear example is offered by the dynamics of the Asian monsoon, which are well captured by climate proxies (Goodkin et al 2019) but poorly represented by the latest generation of GCMs (Aadhar and Mishra 2020). Streamflow reconstructions could therefore help us identify cases in which GCMs are not fully reliable, narrowing a major source of uncertainty for water resources management applications, such as flood risk management (Ziegler et al 2020).…”