The death toll from flooding rises as insurers and governments calculate the costs

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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s pledge to make up to €10 billion in recovery funds available for Europe’s deadly floods this week followed estimates that insurers would face up to €3 billion in damages of euros.

The near-stationary low-pressure system, dubbed Storm Boris, has been stuck between two high-pressure systems, bringing incessant rain to central Europe for several days, leading to more than two dozen estimated deaths in 20 countries.

Thousands of homes and businesses, along with vehicles, infrastructure and agriculture, were flooded in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Romania. Authorities warned that waters could continue to flow through cities in the coming days. The storm moved into northern Italy by the end of the week, prompting the evacuation of residents of the Emilia-Romagna region.

Reinsurance broker Gallagher Re said in a report midweek that there was a “growing expectation” that the flooding in recent days would be one of the costliest extreme weather events on record in the region.

However, advanced forecasting and investment in flood defenses limited potential losses, Gallagher Re added. For example, Prague installed a series of mobile and fixed barriers that were put in place after the disastrous floods of 2002.

The attention of reinsurers and insurers has increasingly focused on the danger of European floods in recent years, the broker said, following several costly events in 1997, 2002 and 2013. In early 2024, significant flooding in southern Germany has also led to at least $2 billion. insured losses.

Storm systems originating near the Gulf of Genoa have been notorious for generating high-impact flooding, the reinsurer noted, including those in southern Germany and parts of central Europe in May and June this year.

While each weather event involved a different set of weather factors, record sea surface temperatures in the Mediterranean and the resulting evaporation fueled the storms this year.

The world experienced its hottest three months to August on record. This month has so far brought a continuation of the extremes, with flooding on four continents, including the latest affecting Vietnam and China and southern US states, as well as an increase in wildfires in areas such as the Amazon and Portugal.

Devastating floods in west and central Africa in recent weeks have killed around 1,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.

The international cohort of climate scientists, known as the World Weather Attribution Research Group, has yet to release its findings on how much global warming contributed to the latest events.

But its co-founder Friederike Otto said this week that the record-breaking heat seen over the past 12 months would have been impossible without climate change and that it contributed to six out of eight heat waves studied. The panel’s preliminary report on European floods is expected next week.

But the flooding continued “a period of months and years of high annual variability, experiencing intense drought and/or abnormal rainfall across Europe,” Gallagher Re said. “These changes are consistent with climate change research, which suggests an increased frequency of changes from one weather extreme to another.”

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