CIS WG F-11 19 th April 2012; Bucharest (Romania) Towards a potential European flood impact database Wouter Vanneuville Project Manager Water & Vulnerability, EEA in collaboration with Joint Research Centre
Why a European flood impact database? other water legislation DG Markt disaster prevention FRM climate change adapt. MIC / DG ECHO solidarity fund
What s available so far? (1) Global level databases Shortcomings: Insufficient categorisation Thresholds excluding significant floods / for subset of impact categories only Quality check (different types of source data) Insufficient geographic detail / lack of flood extend information Incompleteness
What s available so far? (2) Global level databases: Insurance Have shortcomings: Very detailed but not publicly available rough data Missing when no market for insurance Lack of comparability (no primary information source) (3) (European) Projects Specific (region covered, type of floods) Maintenance
Observations Insufficient coverage for detecting the trends of flood losses or guiding the EU disaster risk mitigation and climate change adaptation efforts. The completeness and degree of uncertainty in historic floods data is a major issue, which hampers sound scientific analysis of the data (Barredo 2009) The available information is less suitable for smaller events and for analysis on sub-national level
On MS level: metadata survey Complementary to regular and official reporting 14 answers from 11 countries so far
Observations (based on answers recieved so far) Many countries collect this type of information High frequency of updating / almost 100% country coverage Mixed types of information (attributes, map scales, ) Spatial data not always available Mostly social (fatalities, affected people) and economic impacts (economic losses, insured losses) Only few countries consider cultural and ecological impacts
Where can we go from here? Schemes for PFRA are a reliable basis Location of floods Date of commencement and duration Type of flood Extent Probability Type and degree of adverse consequences PFRA reporting = types of consequences, not (always) degree of impact Using also the developed enumeration lists for types of floods / types of consequences
Users
Summary Conclusions Various EU policy processes need flood impact information; Global disaster databases do not cover events below a threshold, lack spatial explicitness and/or are incomplete; FD reports types of consequences, not degree of impact; PFRA update is every 6 years, national databases are updated more often; ( white areas where art. 13 is used) Project embrace is ongoing (more than human impact)
Proposal Repeat the request of the Budapest meeting to fill in the metadata questionnaire for those countries who didn t do yet Explore what s reported under art. 4/5 of the FD about past floods Explore the development of a European flood impact database and the options to improve the European part of existing key global databases (in particular CRED/EMDAT and Munich Re/Natcatservice) Developments have to be based on the existing tools (INSPIRE / SEIS (WISE)), existing data (quality check of global databases, links to national information, information available from the reporting for the FD)
In a next phase Further develop by in-depth analysis of data for more countries to identify gaps and possible errors and the underlying reasons for the differences in the impact data in countries databases and key global databases Steps towards common understanding for data collection and visualisation (scales, attributes, ), agreements on thresholds,
Thank you! Wouter Vanneuville, EEA