Flooding is one the deadliest and most costly natural hazards on the planet. Nearly one billion people are exposed to the risk of flooding in their lifetimes and about 300 million people are impacted by floods any year resulting in extreme yearly effects on both individuals and societies with estimated costs of 60 billion (US$) in annual losses.
There is clear convergence that climate change is hitherto causing increases in the frequency of extreme rainfall events. These trends are doomed to intensify in the coming decades generating a substantial rise in global flood hazard, with society’s exposure to this risk aggravated still further as a result of population growth and the spreading of people and infrastructure along river courses and onto floodplains.
Climate change is not the only component that can increase global flood hazard. Assessing its dependence on multiple other factors of environmental change such as morphodynamic effects, floodplain connectivity and variation in inundation frequency, and sea level variation is becoming of fundamental importance.
This session invites contributions that explore the response of rivers to hydrological, geomorphological, morphodynamic, and climatic changes that can pose at risk of flooding populations and floodplains as well as investigating how manmade interventions such as flood barriers, managed floodplains and hard engineering are contributing to the increase or reduction of such risk, advancing our understanding on the existing feedback between climate, hydrology, and river morphodynamics in driving changes in future flooding and floodplain alterations.
We encourage interdisciplinary researchers working across the experimental, numerical modelling, and field-based approaches who are advancing methods and providing new insights into: (i) morphodynamic functioning of fluvial systems in driving changes in recent past, present, and future trajectories of flood hazards; (ii) human-induced perturbations that can affect flood hazard and risk; (iii) climate related impacts of future trends in flood hazard; (iv) patterns, trends and drivers of flooding and morphological changes across present and historical records.