FLOPROS: an evolving global database of flood protection standards

Abstract

Abstract. With the projected changes in climate, population and socioeconomic activity located in flood-prone areas, the global assessment of the flood risk is essential to inform climate change policy and disaster risk management. Whilst global flood risk models exist for this purpose, the accuracy of their results is greatly limited by the lack of information on the current standard of protection to floods, with studies either neglecting this aspect or resorting to crude assumptions. Here we present a first global database of FLOod PROtection Standards, FLOPROS, which comprises information in the form of the flood return period associated with protection measures, at different spatial scales. FLOPROS comprises three layers of information, and combines them into one consistent database. The Design layer contains empirical information about the actual standard of existing protection already in place, while the Policy layer and the Model layer are proxies for such protection standards, and serve to increase the spatial coverage of the database. The Policy layer contains information on protection standards from policy regulations; and the Model layer uses a validated modeling approach to calculate protection standards. Based on this first version of FLOPROS, we suggest a number of strategies to further extend and increase the resolution of the database. Moreover, as the database is intended to be continually updated, while flood protection standards are changing with new interventions, FLOPROS requires input from the flood risk community. We therefore invite researchers and practitioners to contribute information to this evolving database by corresponding to the authors.

Global projections of river flood risk in a warmer world

“…Key advances over previous works are: An event‐based selection of simulated flood peaks, enabling more accurate detection of nonlinear patterns of change in flood frequency and magnitude under nonstationary climate. A multiresolution approach, which maximizes the computing power in the representation of different variables and enables the coupling of large datasets. Key example is the use of high‐resolution global flood hazard maps to estimate the impact of floods, coupled with 130+ year climatic projections at daily resolution to assess the flood frequency. The first global‐scale assessment of flood damage, rather than the commonly used exposed GDP, thanks to recent efforts in producing global flood damage functions [ Huizinga and De Moel , ] and of the release of the first global dataset on flood protections [ Scussolini et al, ]. Similarly, advances in mapping the global population distribution [ Pesaresi et al, ] has significantly increased the accuracy in the estimation of population affected by floods. …”

“…Further datasets used in the risk assessment include the FLOPROS [ Scussolini et al, ] global database of FLOod PROtection Standards; land use from the GlobCover 2009 [ Bontemps et al, ]; and damage functions by Huizinga and de Moel []. The latter describe the relation between inundation depth and the corresponding direct economic damage per unit surface, through piece‐wise linear functions.…”

“…Moreover, available estimates of people and assets exposed often rely on simplifications and assumptions needed to enable a global‐scale assessment including regions where data are scarce or unavailable. Novel research efforts have pushed forward the understanding and the mapping of global flood hazard [ Sampson et al, ; Dottori et al, ], exposure [ Freire et al, ], and vulnerability [ Huizinga and De Moel , ; Scussolini et al, ], finally enabling process‐based modeling of river flood risk at global scale under present and future climate conditions.…”

Why We Can No Longer Ignore Consecutive Disasters

“…This underscores the need for risk frameworks and models to include temporal dynamics as an explicit component (2017), such as in Agent Based Models (Aerts et al, ; Haer et al, ). This also calls for data sets to include exposure dynamics, such as migration (Wang & Taylor, ) or DRR measures (Berrang‐Ford et al, ; Scussolini et al, ), a component often lacking in most advanced data sets (EC., ).…”

Paradigm Shifts on Flood Risk Management in Japan: Detecting Triggers of Design Flood Revisions in the Modern Era

“…However, these studies did not consider the dramatic paradigm shift in changing from a green to a technological society, which Japan had experienced. Although several numerical models have recently been developed to assess FRM investments, where safety levels at the global level are considered (Scussolini et al, ; Ward et al, ), they lack consideration of the future evolution of design floods and safety levels. Socio‐hydrology relies heavily on understanding historical processes, to understand what the inherent fluctuations are (including paradigm shifts in society) and how they have been dealt with in the past (Zlinszky & Timár, ).…”