Flood-induced mortality across the globe: Spatiotemporal pattern and influencing factors

Abstract

Impacts of floods on human society have been drawing increasing human concerns in recent years. In this study, flood observations from EM-DAT (Emergency Events Database) and DFO (Dartmouth Flood Observatory) datasets were analyzed to investigate frequency and intensity of floods, and flood-induced mortality, flood-affected population as well during 1975-2016 across the globe. Results indicated that: (1) occurrence rate of floods, flood-induced mortality and flood-affected population were generally increasing globally. However, flood-induced mortality and flood-affected people per flood event were in slight decrease, indicating that flood-induced mortality and flood-affected people due to increased floods exceeded those by individual flood event; (2) annual variation of mortality per flood event is highly related to floods with higher intensity. Specifically, the flood frequency and flood-induced mortality are the largest in Asia, specifically in China, India, Indonesia and Philippine; while significantly increased flood-affected population and mean annual mortality was detected in China, USA and Australia; (3) tropical cyclones (TC) are closely related to flood-induced mortality in parts of the countries along the western coast of the oceans. The frequency of channel floods in these regions is the largest and large proportion of flood-induced deaths and the highest flood-induced mortality can be attributed to TC-induced flash floods; (4) Population density and GDP per unit area are in significantly positive correlation with the number of flood-related victims per unit area, number of deaths and economic losses with exception of low-income countries. However, the flood-affected population and flood-induced mortality increase with decrease of per capita GDP; while the per capita economic loss increases with the increase of per capita GDP, indicating that the higher the population density and GDP per unit for a region, the higher sensitivity of this area to flood hazards.