Rapid rise in costly floods forecast by 2020

Some Asian cities may see a more than 30 percent increase in the population at risk of extreme flooding by 2020, according to leading UK catastrophe modelling company JBA Risk Management.

Research undertaken by JBA Risk Management and published in a report called Flood in Focus highlights how the Asia-Pacific region, with 26 countries, has more than half of the world’s total population. The study draws attention to the extreme flood risk potential within several of the world’s most populous cities and rapidly emerging insurance markets.

Given that several of these cities lie next to major river systems, prone to severe flooding, JBA Risk Management has assessed the potential impacts such extreme flooding poses to future populations.

“This research shows that large conurbations in Asia continue to be at substantial risk of flood damage. It also shows that in the next five years at least, we could reasonably expect this risk to increase based on projected population levels. A lot of this increase is driven purely by socio-economic changes, such as rural-urban migration within Asia-Pacific countries,” said Iain Willis, the study’s author and technical director of JBA Risk Management.

“These findings help reaffirm the importance of flood modelling in the region. The continued rise of non-life and life insurance in the next few years across the Asia-Pacific is backed up by a burgeoning middle class that see insurance as an increasingly important part of their risk management, whether for their families or businesses.”

The analysis focused on four major Asian cities; Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, and Singapore. JBA’s high resolution global flood maps were compared to gridded population density projections to estimate the exposed population in both 2010 and 2020.

The findings highlight that significant population increases are projected for all the cities in the study and that the number of people exposed to extreme river and surface water flooding could increase by more than 30 percent by 2020.

When compared to the JBA river flood maps for a one-in-200-year return period, Bangkok and Jakarta show population exposures of 5.3 million and 5.2 million.