the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 17 Oct 2023
An improved database of flood impacts in Europe, 1870–2020: HANZE v2.1
Dominik Paprotny
Paweł Terefenko
Jakub Śledziowski
Abstract. Assessing long-term trends in flood losses and attributing them to climatic and socio-economic changes requires comprehensive and systematic collection of historical information. Here, we present flood impact data for Europe that is part of the HANZE (Historical Analysis of Natural HaZards) database. The dataset covers riverine, pluvial, coastal and compound floods that have occurred in 42 European countries between 1870 and 2020. The data was obtained by extensive data-collection from more than 800 sources ranging from news reports through government databases to scientific papers. The dataset includes 2521 events characterized by at least one impact statistic: area inundated, fatalities, persons affected or economic loss. Economic losses are presented both in the original currencies and price levels as well as inflation and exchange-rate adjusted to the 2020 value of the euro. The spatial footprint of affected areas is consistently recorded using more than 1400 subnational units corresponding, with minor exceptions, to the European Union’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), level 3. Daily start and end dates, information on causes of the event, notes on data quality issues or associated non-flood impacts, and full bibliography of each record supplement the dataset. Apart from the possibility to download the data (https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8410025), the database can be viewed, filtered and visualized online: https://naturalhazards.eu. The dataset is designed to be complementary to HANZE-Exposure, a high-resolution model of historical exposure changes (such as population and asset value), and be easily usable in statistical and spatial analyses, including multi-hazard studies.
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Dominik Paprotny et al.
Status: open (until 01 Dec 2023)
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CC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-321', Olga Petrucci, 23 Oct 2023
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I read with high interest this paper. I have to compliment with the Authors for the great effort in collecting and assembling this huge amount of data. Working at the European scale is a challenging task, especially because there are no standard data-sources ensuring that all (main) floods are included. Actually, only people who experienced the difficulties in collecting documentary data at large scale can understand the value of this kind of inventories. Nevertheless, people without the direct experience in data searching, can uncritically accept the figures presented, without taking into account possible large gaps, and they use these figures to trace trends that actually can result incorrect, thus building theories on wrong foundations.
I checked HANZE for the nation/region for which I have direct experience, that are Italy and Italian region Calabria. I just looked at the events reporting “fatalities.
Your DB, for a period of 128 years, in 42 European countries, reported 704 fatalities, while one of the papers that you quoted (Papagiannaki et al, 2022) reported 2,875 fatalities “from 12 territories in (nine of which represent entire countries) in Europe and the broader Mediterranean region” in 40 years. Obviously, a more precise comparation could be easily done, because several countries are included in both HANZE and Papagiannaki et al, 2022.
Moving to the national scale, if for Italy we compare fatalities in the same time span reported in HANZE and in Papagiannaki et al, 2022, we found 102 vs 425 fatalities! There must certainly be a reason explaining this large difference…
As you said, the majority of Italian records came from a source labelled as “CNR (2023)”. Actually, you mean the database of the Project AVI (Aree Vulnerate Italiane), realized by IRPI (Istituto di Ricerca per la Protezione Idrogeologica) of CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche). AVI project and its inventory ended around 2000, and then the events occurred after that year are not reported in it. Then also your sentence “Finally, several countries maintain national databases… (Guzzetti and Tonelli, 2004)” is not correct, because AVI DB is not updated to nowadays.
Moving to the regional scale, for my region (ITF6) a very large number of papers have been published about major floods, with or without fatalities. Nevertheless, focusing on fatalities, in HANZE I only found 74 fatalities and no trace of catastrophic events killing hundreds of people in autumn 1951 and 1953, or 6 people in 1996 in Crotone or 12 in 2000 (Soverato) and 10 victims in Raganello flash flood in 2018…I know that place and related exact number of fatalities is a very local kind of knowledge that is very difficult to find looking at the European scale.
Nevertheless, there is a real risk that this region is considered almost … flood free, if compared to other for which you research has been more accurate. This result can remain in an “academic” environment, affecting more or less theoretical studies, but it could also be used at the European level to plan polices and investments for flood impact reductions: in this case, the use of these data can have consequences in terms of investments.
Finally, I have some doubts on the possibility of a correct separation between flood and landslide victims, particularly for older events, and especially if using international data sources. Nevertheless, in your paper, I did not find an explanation of how this can be exactly done. In some case, this kind of mistake is “inherited” from one DB to another. As an example, the Dartmouth Flood Archive wrongly classifies 160 victims of the 1998 Sarno mudflow in Campania (Italy) as flood fatalities. HANZE classified Sarno mudflow event as a “flash flood” but without fatalities.
Then, in my opinion and for my experience, a DB like HANZE, virtually cannot be considered complete, and the few comparisons that I reported in this note could induce at least to reformulate one of the sentences of your paper: “However, the largest resource on occurrence of past damaging floods in Europe remains the HANZE (Historical Analysis of Natural HaZards) database (Paprotny et al., 2018a). It contains 1564 events, covering 36 countries and the period from 1870 to 2016, based on more than 300 data sources”.
Olga Petrucci
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-321-CC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on CC1', Dominik Paprotny, 24 Oct 2023
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We would like to thank Olga Petrucci for taking the time to analyze our paper and data, as well as drawing our attention to multiple issues related to the data. Unfortunately, we have not been able to reproduce the statistics quoted by the author, or find the event-specific problems mentioned. We have all individually checked the data, paper and the website; as we explain below, the author probably has gotten the wrong impression of the data by analyzing only a small portion of the dataset. We would be very grateful for information which file(s) were used as basis of the posted comment, so we can potentially change the formatting of the data to avoid repetition of the problem. Below we reply to each paragraph of the comment:
- “Your DB, for a period of 128 years, in 42 European countries, reported 704 fatalities”. The dataset covers a period of 151 years, of which in 150 separate years there is at least one event, and at least fatality. The total number of fatalities of the 2521 events is 19,322. We don’t know what subset of HANZE was used by the author to arrive at 128 years and 704 fatalities. We should also note that though the other dataset (FFEM) has 2875 fatalities (as opposed to 3455 in HANZE), almost half of it is in Asian countries not covered by HANZE (Turkey and Israel).
- “for Italy we compare fatalities in the same time span reported in HANZE and in Papagiannaki et al, 2022, we found 102 vs 425 fatalities”. For Italy, 1980-2020, HANZE includes 625 fatalities, therefore we again think that the author only looked at some subset of HANZE.
- We use “maintain” in the sense that the cited databases are currently accessible online, as most of them aren’t actually updated (at least not regularly). We did realize that event-specific data in AVI end in 2001 and some summary data in 2003; we used the environmental yearbooks published by the Italian government afterwards in lieu of AVI. If we get a chance to revise our manuscript in ESSD, we will modify the wording in the text to increase its precision.
- “for my region (ITF6) … I only found 74 fatalities”. Events in HANZE that have at least partially occurred in Calabria have a total of 429 fatalities, not 74. The author writes further that “no trace of catastrophic events killing hundreds of people in autumn 1951 and 1953, or 6 people in 1996 in Crotone or 12 in 2000 (Soverato) and 10 victims in Raganello flash flood in 2018”. None of this is correct. The 1951, 1953, 1996 and 2000 events are all in HANZE, as can be quickly checked through the website: https://naturalhazards.eu/details,16134, https://naturalhazards.eu/details,16164, https://naturalhazards.eu/details,16512, https://naturalhazards.eu/details,16527. As for the 2018 event, we specifically excluded it. This is mentioned directly in the paper (L508-L511): “certain flood-related cases of fatalities were excluded here: … Fatalities related to sports activities in remote areas, such as canoeing or hiking, in connection to sudden localized flash floods, as they cannot be reliably modelled both in terms of hazard and exposure, e.g. … Italy 2018 (10 fatalities, FloodList, 2023).”
- As evidenced above, we don’t imply that the region is “risk-free”. Even a look at Fig. 4, or our online map https://naturalhazards.eu/map, gives the exact opposite impression. We mention several times the limitations of the data, and as the study doesn’t say anything about future impacts of climate change in particular, it can’t be used directly for any planning purposes by any reasonable decision-maker.
- It is not true that we show no fatalities for the 1998 Sarno disaster. The event was indeed mostly a landslide, but the AVI catalogue attributes a very small share of impacts (1 fatality, 35 affected) in Caserta province to flood. Therefore, we included those impacts as such, while describing the full impact of the landslide in the “Notes” field for context: https://naturalhazards.eu/details,16517 . Also, we mention several times the problem of co-occurring hazards and the fact that they cannot always be separated from floods (e.g. L131-140, L374-384, L565-582). In the data, we indicate co-occurring landslides or mudslides for 227 events (in “Notes” field).
- The comment’s final paragraph is, in conclusion, erroneous as it is based only on a fraction of our data. Further, we didn’t claim that our work is complete, but the opposite: we indicate the issue of incompleteness several times, including just before the results (L238-240), extensively in the discussion, and in the conclusions.
We encourage the author to have another look at our dataset, especially through our website. We would be very interested in any further feedback that can help us improve the study. Kind regards on behalf of the co-authors,
Dominik Paprotny
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-321-AC1 -
CC2: 'Reply on AC1', Olga Petrucci, 25 Oct 2023
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Dear Dr Paprotny
I downloaded the file HANZE events.csv using the link in the abstract (https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8410025),
best regards
Olga Petrucci
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-321-CC2
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AC1: 'Reply on CC1', Dominik Paprotny, 24 Oct 2023
reply
Dominik Paprotny et al.
Data sets
HANZE database of historical flood impacts in Europe, 1870-2020 Dominik Paprotny https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8410025
Model code and software
HANZE v2.1 flood impact model Dominik Paprotny https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8223833
Dominik Paprotny et al.
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