Lehner et al.: Floods and droughts in Europe – Climatic Change Estimating the impact of global change on flood and drought risks in Europe: a continental, integrated analysis Bernhard Lehner*, Petra Döll, Joseph Alcamo, Thomas Henrichs, Frank Kaspar Center for Environmental Systems Research, University of Kassel, Kurt-Wolters-Straße 3, 34109 Kassel, Germany *Email:
[email protected] Abstract Studies on the impact of climate change on water resources and hydrology typically focus either on average precipitation and flows or, when analyzing extreme events such as floods and droughts, on small areas and case studies. At the same time it is acknowledged that climate change may severely alter the risk of hydrological extremes over large regional scales, that changes in precipitation are likely to be amplified in runoff, and that human water use will put additional pressure on future water resources. In an attempt to bridge these various aspects, this paper presents a first continental, integrated analysis of possible impacts of global change – i.e. climate and water use change – on future flood and drought frequencies at a pan-European scale. The global integrated water model WaterGAP is evaluated regarding its capability to simulate high and low flow regimes and is then applied to calculate relative changes in flood and drought frequencies. The results indicate large ‘critical regions’ for which significant changes in flood or drought risk are expected under the proposed global change scenarios. The regions most prone to a rise in flood frequencies are northern to northeastern Europe, while southern and southeastern Europe show significant increases in drought frequencies.