Flood protection and vulnerability estimates for Europe, 1950-2020

This dataset provides estimates of flood protection levels and flood vulnerability at scale of 1422 subnational regions of 42 European countries over the period 1950–2020. Estimates are based on a set of vine-copula models quantified with data on flood impacts from the HANZE catalogue.

The dataset contains two ZIP files with a total of five shapefiles, each containing a "Code" column with the code of the subnational region (based mainly on EU's NUTS3, v2010 classification) and other column estimates per each year between 1950 and 2020.

NUTS3_Flood_Protection_coast: estimated flood protection level from coastal floods, as average return period in years between occurrence of significant flood impacts;

NUTS3_Flood_Protection_riverine: as above, but for riverine floods;

NUTS3_Vulnerability_Fat_comb: estimated actual fatalities from an hypothetical average flood, as % of potential impact under assumption of a static depth-fatality function and no flood protection within region (S-shaped function shown in Jonkman et al. 2008, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-008-9227-5)

NUTS3_Vulnerability_Pop_aff: estimated actual population affected from an hypothetical average flood, as % of exposed population under assumption of no flood protection within region

NUTS3_Vulnerability_Eco_less: estimated actual direct economic loss (damage to assets) from an hypothetical average flood, as % of potential impact under assumption of static depth-damage functions (from Huizinga et al. 2017, https://doi.org/10.2760/16510) and no flood protection within region.

Detailed methodology is explained in the underlying publication. Code and data to reproduce the results are also available on Zenodo (see "Related works").

Data can be also viewed on https://naturalhazards.eu/