I had the opportunity to give a presentation yesterday at the National Flood Risk Policy Summit to an audience which included many national leaders on flood policy. I promised the audience that I’d post a short entry here with links to relevant background papers and other materials. This post provides these links.

First, here are the main points of my presentation:

*The “100-year flood” is not a good basis for a successful national flood policy.

*Losses provide a basis for evaluating long-term policy success.

*Political factors play a large role in the disaster declaration process.

*Population and development drive loss trends.

*As yet, no link established between human-caused climate change and flood/storm damages

EMERGING ISSUES?
OR THE SAME OLD ISSUES?

Here are relevant background links:

We have created a WWW site – www.flooddamagedata.org — that presents a range of U.S. flood data and analyses. As I mentioned at the talk, we would gladly turn this over to any agency or organization that is interested in keeping it updated, publicly available, and of use to researchers and policy makers. For now it is not being updated.

Several papers of ours are relevant:

On national flood policies:

Pielke Jr., R.A., 1999: Nine fallacies of floods. Climatic Change, 42, 413-438. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2000. Flood Impacts on Society: Damaging Floods as a Framework for Assessment. Chapter 21 in D. Parker (ed.), Floods. Routledge Press: London, 133-155. (PDF)

On climate and flood damage:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and M.W. Downton, 2000. Precipitation and Damaging Floods: Trends in the United States, 1932-97. Journal of Climate, 13(20), 3625-3637. (PDF)

On the politics of flood disaster declarations:

Downton, M. and R.A. Pielke, Jr., 2001. Discretion Without Accountability: Politics, Flood Damage, and Climate, Natural Hazards Review, 2(4):157-166. ((PDF)

On disaster losses and flood damage:

Downton, M., J. Z. B. Miller and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. Reanalysis of U.S. National Weather Service Flood Loss Database, Natural Hazards Review, 6:13-22. (PDF)

Downton, M. and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. How Accurate are Disaster Loss Data? The Case of U.S. Flood Damage, Natural Hazards, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 211-228. (PDF)

On flood disasters related to tropical cyclones:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and R. Klein, 2005. Distinguishing Tropical Cyclone-Related Flooding in U.S. Presidential Disaster Declarations: 1965-1997, Natural Hazards Review, May 2005, pp. 55-59. (PDF)

On the role of demographics in hurricane losses:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., Gratz, J., Landsea, C.W., Collins, D., Saunders, M., and Musulin, R., 2007. Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900-2005. Natural Hazards Review, (submitted). (link)

For a global perspective, see the report of our Hohenkammer Workshop, in parthership with Munich Re, GKSS, and the Tyndall Centre.

More along these lines can be found here.