Flood-induced mortality across the globe.pdf

Flood-induced mortality across the globe: Spatiotemporal pattern and

influencing factors

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, floodaffected

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-inducedmortality

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-inducedmortality 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.