Impacts of climate warming on global floods and their implication to current flood defense standards

Floods usually threaten human lives and cause serious economic losses, which can be more severe in the context of global warming. It is a salient challenge to find out how global flood risk changes and whether current flood protection standards will face more pressures. This study aims to characterize changes in global floods and explicit flood defense pressures in warming climates of 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0°C above pre-industrial levels. Here we show that amplification effects of higher air temperature on the range of changes in flood frequency and magnitude are projected. Southeast Eurasia, Africa, and South America are hotspots of changes for significant proportions of watersheds with larger flood patterns and greater changing extents than others. Most watersheds worldwide is likely to face increasing flood defense pressures in warming climates. Our findings could improve the understanding of future flood conditions under the warming climates and provide information to mitigation and adaptation policymaking.

लेखक:	Chen, Jie;Shi, Xinyan;Gu, Lei;Wu, Guiyang;Su, Tianhua;Wang, Hui-Min;Kim, Jong-Suk;Zhang, Liping;Xiong, Lihua
भाषा:	English
प्रकाशक:	Journal of Hydrology
प्रकाशित मिती:	February 2023