Water, Water, Everywhere

Professor Bill McGuire, Director of Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, discusses the escalation of flood risk. 2007 is described as the year of the flood. Predictions suggest that changes in precipitation are one of the biggest consequences of climate change. Areas of high population density and large wealth concentration, namely, North America, the UK and Europe and the tropical East and South East Asia, all face the prospect of increasing flood exposure.

Global floods

Worldwide, 2007 was the year of the flood. In the UK, torrential summer rains caused flooding of 55,000 homes and businesses in the north east and central England with damage costing more than USD8bn (USD6bn insured).¹ Daunting as this sounds, other countries fared far worse. In Africa, two million people suffered the most devastating floods in 35 years, with 650,000 losing their homes, while across Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh, monsoon floods disrupted the lives of 20 million people and left 1,500 dead.² Catastrophic floods were also reported from countries as far apart as Korea, China, Indonesia, Argentina, Haiti, Mexico and Nicaragua. The widespread flooding of 2007 might be regarded as a blip, if it were not for the fact that we are seeing progressively more floods. For example, the annual number of major floods worldwide has escalated from around 100 in the early 1990s to more than 250 in the first few years of the new millennium³ and the number of severe flood events has doubled since 1980.⁴

In the last 15 years more than 1,000 river flood related disasters have taken well over 100,000 lives across the world, made life a misery for billions, and caused economic losses of close to one trillion US dollars. In China alone, where flooding on the Yangtze, Yellow and other rivers dwarfs anything seen elsewhere on the planet, biblical-scale floods in 1991 and 1998 each affected more than 200 million people. 2005 was another bad year, and floods in the Yangtze Basin took close to 2,000 lives and displaced 14 million people. The annual cost of river flooding in China now typically amounts to several billion US dollars, peaking in 1998, with economic losses estimated at USD32bn, and insured losses are progressively increasing. There have always been devastating river floods, but it seems now as if there are even more of them. Few places are immune, with the Mississippi Basin in 1993, much of the UK in 2000 and 2007, Central Europe in 1998 and 2002, and great tracts of Bangladesh and China disappearing beneath the floodwaters almost every year. To read the complete report online please click here.

In reproducing this Highlight article we would like to acknowledge the whole team and writers at Benfield Research (www.benfieldgroup.com e-mail benfieldresearch@benfieldgroup.com telephone +44 (0)20 7522 4125) whose work we gratefully appreciate.

Our next e-newsletter we will continue to feature Highlight articles in collaboration with Benfield Research at Benfield Group. The second will discuss some of the responses to handling the cost of Flood Risk.

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