Developing a large-scale dataset of flood fatalities for territories in the Euro-Mediterranean region, FFEM-DB.

This data paper describes the multinational Database of Flood Fatalities from the Euro-Mediterranean region FFEM-DB that hosts data of 2,875 flood fatalities from 12 territories (nine of which represent entire countries) in Europe and the broader Mediterranean region from 1980 to 2020. The FFEM-DB database provides data on fatalities' profiles, location, and contributing circumstances, allowing researchers and flood risk managers to explore demographic, behavioral, and situational factors, as well as environmental features of flood-related mortality. The standardized data collection and classification methodology enable comparison between regions beyond administrative boundaries. The FFEM-DB is expandable, regularly updated, publicly available, and with anonymized data. The key advantages of the FFEM-DB compared to existing datasets containing flood fatalities are its high level of detail, data accuracy, record completeness, and the large sample size from an extended area.

Making the COVID-19 crisis a real opportunity for environmental sustainability.

An optimistic narrative has gained momentum during the first year of the pandemic: the COVID-19 crisis may have opened a window of opportunity to "rebuild better", to spur societal transitions towards environmental sustainability. In this comment, we review first evidence of individual and political changes made so far. Findings suggest that economies worldwide are not yet building back better. Against this background, we argue that a naïve opportunity narrative may even impair the progress of transitions towards environmental sustainability because it may render green recovery measures ineffective, costly, or infeasible. Based on these observations, we derive conditions for green recovery policies to succeed. They should consist of a policy mix combining well-targeted green subsidies with initiatives to price emissions and scrap environmentally harmful subsidies. Moreover, green recovery policies must be embedded into a narrative that avoids trading off environmental sustainability with other domains of sustainability-and rather highlights respective synergies that can be realized when recovering from the COVID-19 crisis.

Compound and cascading drought impacts do not happen by chance: A proposal to quantify their relationships.

The understanding of compounding and cascading impacts is becoming increasingly central to the risk reduction debate as hazard consequences are strongly coupled. Still, studies on their quantification and visualization are limited. This restricts the establishment of impact-based early warning systems. Here, a novel method for quantifying drought compound impacts and their cascading paths is presented by integrating network analysis and data mining tools. The 2018/19 drought in Germany is used as a case study. Network graphs are employed to display impact co-occurrences and cascades of agriculture, livestock, forestry, industry, and recreation impacts. Furthermore, sequential pattern mining is used to predict the next impact that is likely to take place. A synthesis of the identified relationships is presented using accessible visual formats. Results show that simultaneous and cascading drought impacts may not happen by chance but follow a pattern. Indeed, statistically significant co-occurrence associations outnumbered randomly distributed ones (91.1% versus 8.9%). With regard to the cascading paths, cross-validation results show that within three attempts, the next impact class was accurately predicted in 72.9% of the cases. Crop losses were usually followed up by a shortage of feed for livestock and consequent early slaughtering of animals. This implies that in order to limit drought impacts, there is a need to consider their compounding and cascading effects. Hence, researchers need to move from the analysis of single impacts to the understanding of how multi-sectoral impacts are connected with each other. The methodology proposed here paves towards this direction. The visualization tools used can help to increase awareness of the possible impact interactions and dependency, improving drought managers' decision-making ability. Moreover, the obtained results can serve as the basis for inferring impact causal relationships.