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According to the most accurate model yet developed, flood damage losses across Europe are expected
to increase four fold by 2050. The scientists believe that the continent's
annual flood costs may be 23.5bn euros by the middle of the century.
Two-thirds of the projected increase in flood damage will be caused by human development,
not climate change. The study has been published in the journal
Nature Climate Change. One of the big problems for European flood
disaster research has been that countries tend to do their risk assessments on their
own, using different models and methodologies compared with their neighbours.
"This is not an accurate way of working," said lead author Brenden Jongman from VU University
in Amsterdam. "We show that if you have very high flood
risk in the UK there is also a very high risk in northern France, the Netherlands and some
parts of Germany." Risk underestimated
Rather than looking at individual flood risks, the team decided to look at maximum water
discharges in over 1,000 European river sub-basins, or parts of catchments.
They found that different rivers often reach dangerous levels at the same time, threatening
large regions. "If you don't take into account these spatial
co-relations then you highly underestimate the risk - there is a much higher risk than
we actually think so far," said Mr Jongman. "We say the average annual losses are expected
to increase by a factor of four between now and 2050."