Heavy Rainfall#
In the past decades, 95% of the natural disaster events reported in Europe were weather-related (e.g., hydrological, climatological or meteorological induced), with the most prevalent categorised as floods (41%) (CRED, 2021). In this context, pluvial and urban flooding – types of flash floods due to extreme rainfall events exceeding the capacity of natural or human-made drainage systems – comprise the majority of the floods recorded in the European region (Bednar-Friedl et al., 2022). The explosive nature of flash floods and their rapid onset, that significantly reduces the time frame for protection actions, has led to numerous fatalities and extensive socio-economic damages in billions of euros for a single event alone.
According to the projections published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the intensity and frequency of triggering intense rainfall events are expected to increase within the current climate emergency. Moreover, further studies have provided robust evidence that the intensification of heavy precipitation, combined with rapid urbanisation, will likely lead to more frequent and extreme flood events at additional warning levels. In this scenario, the pressure of the changing flood hazard on communities, their citizens and their properties is evident. Although there is an ongoing debate on the estimated socio-economic losses that could be observed, there is a consensus that extreme rainfall will substantially increase flood damages if insufficient or no adaptation measures to improve the preparedness and coping capacity of communities are developed and implemented.
Workflows#
References#
Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. (2021). Extreme weather events in Europe. https://www.cred.be/sites/default/files/CredCrunch64.pdf
Bednar-Friedl, B., Biesbroek, R., Schmidt, D., Alexander, P., Børsheim, K., Carnicer, J., Georgopoulou, E., Haasnoot, M., Le Cozannet, G., Lionello, P., Lipka, O., Möllmann, C., Muccione, V., Mustonen, T., Piepenburg, D., & Whitmarsh, L. (2022). Europe. In Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, 1817–1927. doi:10.1017/9781009325844.015