HANZE database of historical flood impacts in Europe, 1870-2020

The HANZE dataset covers riverine, pluvial, coastal and compound floods that have occurred in 42 European countries between 1870 and 2020. The data was collected by extensive data-collection from more than 800 sources ranging from news reports through government databases to scientific papers. The dataset includes 2521 events characterized by at least one impact statistic: area inundated, fatalities, persons affected or economic loss. Economic losses are presented both in the original currencies and price levels as well as inflation and exchange-rate adjusted to 2020 value of the euro. The spatial footprint of affected areas is consistently recorded using more than 1400 subnational units corresponding, with minor exceptions, to the European Union’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), level 3. Daily start and end dates, information on causes of the event, notes on data quality issues or associated non-flood impacts, and full bibliography of each record supplement the dataset. Apart from the possibility to download the data, the database can be viewed, filtered and visualized online: https://naturalhazards.eu. The dataset is designed to be complimentary to HANZE-Exposure, a high-resolution model of historical exposure changes (such as population and asset value), and be easily usable in statistical and spatial analyses.

The dataset contains the following files (CSV comma-delimited, UTF8, and ESRI shapefiles in zipped folders)

HANZE flood events database   

HANZE_events.csv - Flood event data

HANZE_references.csv - List of all references

HANZE_events_regions_2010.zip - Flood event data as GIS file (regions v2010)

HANZE_events_regions_2021.zip - Flood event data as GIS file (regions v2021)

Supplementary data      

S1_countries_codes_and_names.csv - Country codes/names

S2_regions_codes_and_names_v2010.csv - Region codes/names, v2010

S3_regions_codes_and_names_v2021.csv - Region codes/names, v2021

S4_list_of_all_currencies_by_country.csv - Data on all currencies used in the study area since 1870

S5_currency_conversion_rates.csv - Conversion rates applied to compute losses in 2020 euros

S6_GDP_deflators_by_country.csv - Gross domestic product deflator by country, 1870-2020

S7_floods_removed_from_HANZE.csv - Flood events in HANZE v1, which were excluded from v2

Regions_v2010_simplified.zip - Map of subnational regions used in the database, v2010

Regions_v2021_simplified.zip - Map of subnational regions used in the database, v2021

Note: this is a minor update of the original upload. It fixes some geometry problems with the GIS files and makes some small changes to the flood data (2 events were added and the regional codes for Kosovo in version 2021 were modified based on the upcoming NUTS 2024 classification).