HANZE: a pan-European database of exposure to natural hazards and damaging historical floods since 1870

Abstract

The influence of social and economic change on the consequences of natural hazards has been a matter of much interest recently. However, there is a lack of comprehensive, high-resolution data on historical changes in land use, population or assets available to study this topic. Here, we present HANZE database, or ‘Historical Analysis of Natural Hazards in Europe’, which contains two parts: (1) HANZE-Exposure with maps for 37 countries and territories from 1870 to 2020 in 100 m resolution and (2) HANZE-Events, a compilation of past disasters with information on dates, locations and losses, currently limited to floods only. The database was constructed using high-resolution maps of present land use and population, a large compilation of historical statistics, and relatively disaggregation techniques and rule-based land-use reallocation schemes. Data encompassed in HANZE allow to ‘normalize’ information on losses due to natural hazards by taking into account inflation as well as changes in population, production and wealth. Database of past events currently contains 1564 records (1870–2016) of flash, river, coastal and compound floods. HANZE database is freely available at https://doi.org/10.4121/collection:HANZE