Marc Bierkens has been elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Citation: For contributions in understanding hydrological
processes across scales and the modeling
and analysis of climate change and human water use
on global groundwater stocks.

He will be honored at the current AGU General assembly.

See also this announcement or this issue EOS magazine!

The World Resources Institute has launced the Aqueduct Global Flood Analyzer v1.0. It the first-ever public analysis of current and future river-flood risks worldwide.

The Analyzer estimates current and 2030 values for potential exposed GDP, affected population and urban damage from river floods for every state, country, and major river basin in the world.

The tool is based on a large number of runs with our global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB  from 1070-2030 using bias-corrected global climate models as inputs. These runs have been downscaled by Deltares and turned into flood risk (people and GDP affected) by IVM-VU University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and the  under different socio-economic scenarios made by PBL- Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

See the blog post at WRI for more information.

The key findings are:

Key findings:

• River flooding could affect more people and cause significantly more damage by 2030, as climate change and socio-economic development accelerate.

Increased flood expore by 2013

• Today, river flooding affects 21 million people worldwide and exposes $96 billion in GDP on average each year. By 2030, those numbers could grow to 54 million people and $521 billion in GDP exposed every year.

Today’s GDP exposed to river floods

• Top 11 countries (ranked by affected population) are India, Bangladesh, China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Brazil.

Top 15 countries with greatest percentage of population exposed to river floods

See the publications supporting this research: Winsemius et al (2013) and Ward et al. (2014).