DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8221453
title: HANZE database of historical flood impacts in Europe, 1870-2025

description: The HANZE dataset covers riverine, pluvial, coastal and compound floods that have occurred in 42 European countries between 1870 and 31 March 2025. The data was collected by extensive data-collection from more than 1000 sources ranging from news reports through government databases to scientific papers. The dataset includes 2687 events characterized by at least one impact statistic: area inundated, fatalities, persons affected or economic loss. Economic losses are presented both in the original currencies and price levels as well as inflation and exchange-rate adjusted to 2024 value of the euro. The spatial footprint of affected areas is consistently recorded using more than 1400 subnational units corresponding, with minor exceptions, to the European Union’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), level 3. Daily start and end dates, information on causes of the event, notes on data quality issues or associated non-flood impacts, and full bibliography of each record supplement the dataset. Apart from the possibility to download the data, the database can be viewed, filtered and visualized online: https://naturalhazards.eu. The dataset is designed to be complimentary to HANZE-Exposure, a high-resolution model of historical exposure changes (such as population and asset value), and be easily usable in statistical and spatial analyses.

This is a preliminary update of HANZE v2.1, adding 169 floods for years 2021-2025 (until 31 March 2025). It makes only minor revisions to previous data (adds 11 pre-2021 events, revises 17 records and removes 3 events that were newly reassessed as non-flood events). A more extensive revision of the data is planned for 2026.

The dataset contains the following files (CSV comma-delimited, UTF8, and ESRI shapefiles in zipped folders)

HANZE flood events database   

HANZE_events.csv - Flood event data

HANZE_references.csv - List of all references

HANZE3_events_regions_2010.zip - Flood event data as GIS file (regions v2010)

HANZE3_events_regions_2021.zip - Flood event data as GIS file (regions v2021)

HANZE3_events_regions_2021.zip - Flood event data as GIS file (regions v2021)

Supplementary data      

S1_countries_codes_and_names.csv - Country codes/names

S2_regions_codes_and_names_v2010.csv - Region codes/names, v2010

S3_regions_codes_and_names_v2021.csv - Region codes/names, v2021

S3a_regions_codes_and_names_v2024.csv - Region codes/names, v2024

S4_list_of_all_currencies_by_country.csv - Data on all currencies used in the study area since 1870

S5_currency_conversion_rates.csv - Conversion rates applied to compute losses in 2024 euros

S6_GDP_deflators_by_country.csv - Gross domestic product deflator by country, 1870-2025

S7_floods_removed_from_HANZE.csv - Flood events in HANZE v1 and v2, which were excluded from v3

Regions_v2010_simplified.zip - Map of subnational regions used in the database, v2010

Regions_v2021_simplified.zip - Map of subnational regions used in the database, v2021

Regions_v2024_simplified.zip - Map of subnational regions used in the database, v2024
description: This update of the HANZE database was supported by European Commission Joint Research Centre through contract EC JRC/IPR/2025/VLVP/126 9.

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through project "Decomposition of flood losses by environmental and economic drivers" (FloodDrivers), project no. 449175973