At melting glaciers, lakes are being formed where meltwater gets trapped behind debris or ice dams. Floods caused by outbursts of ice-dammed lakes have become less extreme over the past 120 years.

Mainly exposure and to a lesser extent climate change are increasing flood risk by hundreds of percent this century. Measures reducing vulnerability can counterbalance this risk by only 15%.

The ‘Geography of Future Water Challenges’, a new book on the many water challenges around the globe, to be launched at the UN Water Conference, is now available online.

The summer of 2020 was the warmest in four decades. According to satellite data, burned area was sevenfold larger in 2020 than the 1982–2020 average. The link to climate change is clear.

Increased extreme precipitation in recent decades has increased river floods globally. Previous studies failed to detect this because mixing catchments with different flood types blurred the results.

The combination of global changes in crop yields, cropping frequency and cropland area determines the impact of climate change on global agricultural production, and all of them will decrease.

Even if global temperatures rise by no more than 1.5°C, around 104,000 glaciers will disappear by 2100. At least half of those will vanish by 2050.

In several coastal cities, land subsidence is much faster than the IPCC reported in its latest assessment, data for 48 coastal cities, representing 20% of the global urban population, shows.

Past economic losses by extreme weather events are not due to climate change. But ‘the times they are a changing‘. Today, many events do show a climate change fingerprint in loss and damage.

The global land area that is below mean sea level increases much faster in the earlier stages of sea level rise than previously thought. This is bad news for poor coastal communities in particular.

Over the last 100 years, the severity of droughts has increased in Europe. Not due to less precipitation, but to higher temperatures that lead to more evaporation by plants and from the soil.

Weather regimes with thunderstorms and lightning shift to the north, increasing lightning frequency at higher latitudes in the summer. More thunderstorms are also expected over the Alps.

The thawing of the permafrost in the Arctic is causing damage to the infrastructure and buildings of the Arctic states. Russia is expected to have the highest burden of costs.

On 7-8 December 2022, I will join the National Disasters Expo in Singapore, the world’s leading event for the management and mitigation of natural disasters.

Over 50% of global coastlines are rock coasts. Retreat rates of rock coast cliffs will likely accelerate this century, by at least 3–7 times present-day rates at a UK coast, scientists show.

Experts studied all the available information on sea level rise projections and concluded that 1.55 m sea level rise by 2100 is the plausible high-end estimate we should use for adaptation planning.

Each year the Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, publishes a report on the global status on health and climate change. Health is still at the mercy of fossil fuels, they conclude.

Drained peatlands make up only 3% of the agricultural land in the European Union but emit 25% of the total agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. The advantages of rewetting them are manifold.

Without adequate flood protection, nearly one in four of the world’s population has at least 1% chance of getting wet feet, or worse, every year. Most of them live in low-income countries.

The impacts of dam building and land-use change on sediment fluxes in rivers outpace the growing threats from climate change, with dramatic consequences for densely populated river deltas.