Project description
Europe’s floodplains under the microscope
Flood prevention measures have altered rivers and coastal landscapes. For instance, the construction of levees and dikes may result in riskier development, increasing damage when extreme floods strike. On the other hand, repeated flooding can promote local precautionary measures, lowering vulnerability. The ERC-funded EuroSoHo project aims to develop a continent-wide socio-hydrological model that integrates historical flood data, societal responses, and flood prevention measures across 1 400 regions in more than 40 countries. The project will study the interplay of climate, human behaviour, and infrastructure in order to identify the most effective strategies for reducing flood risk.
Objective
European riverine and coastal floodplains are highly managed systems, where different human actions can both increase or decrease flood risk. For instance, the “levee effect” could reduce the effectiveness of structural flood protection by encouraging exposure growth and lack of individual precaution, increasing impacts when a severe flood eventually overwhelms the dikes. On the other hand, frequent flooding has been shown to reduce vulnerability through adoption of local precautionary measures (“adaptation effect”). Current European projections of future flood risk under climate change do not consider these types of effects and other dynamic interactions in floodplains. Though such feedbacks could be captured by socio-hydrological models, those have been so far limited to small case studies due to lack of data. The aim of this project is to develop a European Socio-Hydrological Model (EuroSoHo) to quantify past and future flood risk dynamics across the continent. This probabilistic, system dynamics model will be calibrated on historical (1950–2025) data on flood occurrence, their impacts (fatalities, population affected, economic loss), floodplain exposure changes, and large-scale flood prevention schemes across more than 1400 regions in 42 European countries. The model will incorporate multiple socio-hydrological parameters (e.g. awareness, preparedness, reactiveness or risk aversion), quantifying the historical baseline of the society’s reaction to floods. EuroSoHo will then be able to project the future evolution (2026–2100) of the human-water system in Europe under the expected changes of both hydroclimatic and socioeconomic forcing. The system-wide positive and negative effects of improving dikes, extending individual preparedness, restrictions on exposure growth, and relocation will be quantified with EuroSoHo. The results will indicate which combination of adaptation strategies would be most effective in each region given their local-scale costs and benefits
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology governance crisis management flood risk management
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences climatology climatic changes
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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71-453 SZCZECIN
Poland
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