Abstract
Economic damages from riverine flooding are expected to grow because of climate change. Yet, there are few studies analyzing flooding damages in the USA that clearly measure the roles of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability separately and locally. A lack of this knowledge prohibits spatially detailed predictions of future damages. By being able to separate into these three risk factors, we provide all necessary inputs for uncertainty analysis of the flooding damages forecasts that can incorporate new predictive scenarios for each component. To analyze the flooding risk factors of non-coastal counties within the contiguous USA between 1999 and 2018, we gathered information on (1) property and human damages from flooding, (2) maximum annual river discharge, (3) the number of housing units and the years in which they were built, and (4) the incidence of flooding events. We used the method of trimmed least absolute deviated and trimmed least square estimators to obtain the individual impact of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability in the context of censored flooding damages for panel data. The resulting estimates indicate that exposure has been the main driver of flooding risk for most counties in the USA. We use these estimates to describe the main source of flooding risk for non-coastal counties for the 1999–2018 period.
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Data availability
The Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States was purchased from the Arizona State University (2021). The number of extreme days was estimated from simulations of the WBM (University of New Hampshire 2024). The housing units were inferred using the years of building construction reported by the U.S. Census Bureau in the American Community Survey (2022). NOAA reports the incidence of flooding in the storm events database (2022b).
Notes
This HEV framework is useful to understand why some areas suffer greater damages, but it does not define the role of economic agents and their decisions, such as how much to invest on reducing vulnerability or whether to allow for urban expansion into flooding-prone areas (exposure). There is potential to build a model that considers economic perspectives of individuals, firms, and government, each taking action to safeguard against flooding.
The survey does not report the exact year of construction, but the decade.
Flooding events refer to any entry in the Storm Events Database of NOAA (2022) even when they did not cause human or property damage. We accounted for the following categories: "Flash Flood", "Flood", "Thunderstorm Winds/Flash Flood", "Thunderstorm Winds/ Flood", "Thunderstorm Winds/Flooding".
Dodge (Georgia) and Ste. Genevieve (Missouri) are similar counties in terms of hazard and exposure (\({\alpha }_{a}={\alpha }_{b}\)): both have 15–17 average extreme days per year, 6,600–7,100 average housing units, and $17,000-$21,000 annual average property damages; in 1999, they both had favorable weather (\({H}_{a1999}={H}_{b1999}=0\)) and no damages (\({D}_{a1999}={D}_{b1999}=0\)). However, while Dodge never had human damages before 1999, Ste. Genevieve had two injured people and two fatalities in 1996 which reflects important differences in vulnerability and risk that may persist until 1999 \(({V}_{a1999}<{V}_{b1999}, {F}_{A1999}<{F}_{B1999}\)).
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Funding
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program, Earth and Environmental Systems Modeling, MultiSector Dynamics under Cooperative Agreements DE-SC0022141 and DE-SC0016162.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by C-P. C-P wrote the structure of the manuscript; LJ, GD, and HT edited and organized the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript. We recognize Dr. Michael Delgado’s (Purdue University) comments and suggestions.
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Alfredo, CP., Jing, L., Danielle, G. et al. Linkages between riverine flooding risk and economic damage over the continental United States. Nat Hazards 120, 5941–5952 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06445-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06445-z