The Cost of Europe's Floods Could Quadruple by 2050

With rain still battering the UK, the widespread and devastating flooding that has washed over the country this winter remains on everyone’s mind—and in some people’s living rooms.

The cost of the clean-up effort has already been estimated as up to a hefty £1 billion ($1.67 billion),  and while British Prime Minister David Cameron might have said that money was “no object” in dealing with the crisis, you can be sure he didn’t mean that literally.

But compared to what we’re going to see in the future, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, that’s not a bad deal. Researchers from VU University Amsterdam, the international institute IIASA, and the European Commission, wrote that flood losses across Europe could so much as quadruple by 2050 owing to “climate change and socioeconomic development.”

The role of the first of those, climate change, should be obvious. It’s widely accepted that as global warming continues, we’ll see more extreme weather events and more precipitation, which is a recipe for the kind of widespread and enduring floods the UK has seen this winter, and large areas of Europe including Germany, the Czech Republic, and Austria, saw in May and June last year.

Climate change accounted for one third of the increased costs the researchers’ models predicted. The larger portion was down to socio-economic development, which basically refers to the fact that the more we build, the more there is to flood. “Socioeconomic growth accounts for about two-thirds of the increased risk, as development leads to more buildings and infrastructure that could be damaged in a flood,” explained IIASA on their website.

Taking both factors into account, the study estimated that the annual cost of flooding across the whole of Europe was €4.9 billion between the years of 2000 and 2012, and that this could rise to up to €23.5 billion by 2050. Of that, insured losses were expected to increase from €1.6 billion to €4.6 billion. “In addition, large events such as the 2013 European floods are likely to increase in frequency from an average of once every 16 years to a probability of once every 10 years by 2050,” they found.

What’s interesting about the study is that it looked at weather events across the whole of Europe. This might seem quite a basic observation, but earlier studies tend to look at floods as limited to one river region, which doesn’t take into account the fundamental truth that weather in one place can have a knock-on effect on weather in another place, and that climate doesn’t stop at country boundaries.

“So far, little is known about such flood hazard interdependencies across regions, and the corresponding joint risks at regional to continental scales,” the authors wrote. “Reliable information on correlated loss probabilities is crucial for developing robust insurance schemes and public adaptation funds, and for enhancing our understanding of climate change impacts.”

Their work isn’t all doom and gloom; they also set out ways in which losses could be dealt with and minimised, again focusing on Europe-wide measures rather than individual countries. Increasing flood insurance was one suggestion, though obviously that would cost more for those taking out policies, and might not be a popular solution.

Expanding the EU’s Solidarity Fund, which exists to help deal with major natural disasters across the continent, was another option—but the European Commission wrote that would put added strain on the EU budget and could lead to “reduced national government responsibility and insurance incentives.”

The best course of action would of course be to invest in flood protection before the event. That’s something the current British government has been under fire for, after they cut budgets for flood defences and initiatives to deal with and adapt to the realities of climate change.

While flood defences might have a high up-front cost, they’re cheaper than damages incurred without investment in this area—UK climate advisers have suggested the payoff would be a saving of £8 for every £1 spent.

But lead author of this new study Brenden Jongman pointed out to the BBC that the political incentive perhaps wasn’t there for governments to spend on flood defences. “The costs of these investments come up front, but the benefits of this flood protection might be in the future, not in the current government's term,” he said. “There may be no votes for them.”