Assessing the consequences of compound coastal–fluvial flooding under climate change: exposure, vulnerability and damage estimates in eastern England

Gudde, Ross, He, Yi ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3014-3964, Pasquier, Ulysse ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8390-9062 and Sayers, Paul (2026) Assessing the consequences of compound coastal–fluvial flooding under climate change: exposure, vulnerability and damage estimates in eastern England. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 145. ISSN 2212-4209

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Abstract

Flood risk is projected to increase under climate change due to more frequent extreme events and expanding human development in hazard-prone areas. While large-scale assessments provide valuable overviews of emerging risk, they often lack the spatial detail and social-environmental integration needed to inform local adaptation planning. This study applies a high-resolution hazard-exposure-vulnerability framework to assess compound coastal–fluvial flood risk and evaluates how methodological choices affect estimates of exposure, economic damage and spatial risk. The framework is applied to the low-lying Broadland catchment in eastern England using UKCP18 convection-permitting climate projections under RCP8.5 to simulate compound flood scenarios for 1990, 2030, and 2070. Exposure is assessed using population and property data, while vulnerability is quantified across 31 social, economic, and environmental indicators statistically weighted via principal components analysis. The results show that methodological choices can substantially influence outcomes. In particular, building depth sampling methods and depth–damage assumptions can alter loss estimates by over 70%, while different population datasets affect estimated human exposure. By using the OpenPopGrid population dataset and the footprint-maximum depth, the estimated economic damages increase from £439 million in 1990 to £718 million in 2070, with risk concentrated in urban coastal locations where exposure and vulnerability converge. By integrating high-resolution climate projections with spatially explicit vulnerability analysis, this study demonstrates how local-scale assessments can provide spatially detailed evidence to inform adaptation planning. The framework is potentially transferable to other coastal and estuarine regions, although its implementation depends on the availability and local suitability of hazard, exposure and vulnerability data.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability: The exposure datasets are available from: OpenPopGrid [1]; Meta's Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) population dataset (HDX, 2026); OS OpenMap (EDINA Digimap); and Verisk UKBuildings (EDINA Digimap). The vulnerability datasets are available as detailed in Table S3 in the Supplementary Information document. Flood scenario rasters from Gudde et al. [2] are available from: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19510451
Uncontrolled Keywords:	flood,risk,hazard,exposure,vulnerability,climate
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences Faculty of Science > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Sep 2026 09:02
Last Modified:	13 Sep 2026 08:51
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104479
DOI:	10.1016/j.ijdrr.2026.106410

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