By Tik Root, The Washington Post, August 4, 2021
Tens of millions of people have been moving into flood zones around the world. The influx is as much as 10 times more than previously thought, and if the trend continues on its current trajectory millions more could suffer the impacts of flooding, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“People die and lose their homes and livelihood,” said Beth Tellman, a human-environmental geographer at the University of Arizona and lead author of the paper. The study estimates that up to 86 million people have moved into places where there have been floods, which Tellman says is only “the tip of the iceberg.”
Tellman and her colleagues collected satellite imagery of 913 largeflood events around the world, from 2000 and 2018. The database included floods from rivers, tropical storms, melting ice and snow, as well as dam or levee breaks. Researchers then compared the population of the flooded areas between 2000 to 2015.
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