Journal
NATURE
Volume 608, Issue 7921, Pages 80-+Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04917-5
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Funding
- Alexander v on Humboldt Foundation Professorship endowed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) [PID2020-113638RB-C22]
- Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain
- Centre for Climate and Resilience Research [ANID/FONDAP/15110009]
- CNES, through the TOSCA GRANT SWHYM
- DECIDER (BMBF) [01LZ1703G]
- Deltares research programme on water resources
- Dutch Research Council VIDI grant [016.161.324]
- FLOOD [BMBF 01LP1903E]
- Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate
- Global Water Futures programme of University of Saskatchewan
- GlobalHydroPressure
- HUMID project [CGL2017-85687-R]
- HydroSocialExtremes [771678]
- MYRIAD-EU (European Union) [101003276]
- PerfectSTORM [ERC2020-StG 948601]
- Project EFA210/16 PIRAGUA
- ERDF [POCTEFA 2014, ANID/NSFC190018]
- National Research and Development Agency of Chile
- SECurITY [787419]
- SPATE [4776-N]
- DFG research group [FOR 2416]
- UK Natural Environment Research Council
- project Land Management in Lowland Catchments for Integrated Flood Risk Reduction (LANDWISE) [NE/R004668/1]
- UK NERC [NE/S013210/1]
- Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development [105.06-2019.20]
- Vietnam National University-HCMC [C2018-48-01]
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Risk management can reduce the impacts of floods and droughts, but faces difficulties in managing unprecedented events of a greater magnitude. Improved risk management and integrated management can help lower the impacts of more hazardous events.
Risk management has reduced vulnerability to floods and droughts globally(1,2), yet their impacts are still increasing(3). An improved understanding of the causes of changing impacts is therefore needed, but has been hampered by a lack of empirical data(4,5). On the basis of a global dataset of 45 pairs of events that occurred within the same area, we show that risk management generally reduces the impacts of floods and droughts but faces difficulties in reducing the impacts of unprecedented events of a magnitude not previously experienced. If the second event was much more hazardous than the first, its impact was almost always higher. This is because management was not designed to deal with such extreme events: for example, they exceeded the design levels of levees and reservoirs. In two success stories, the impact of the second, more hazardous, event was lower, as a result of improved risk management governance and high investment in integrated management. The observed difficulty of managing unprecedented events is alarming, given that more extreme hydrological events are projected owing to climate change(3).
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