by Oliver Moody, May 29, 2018 in TheNYTimes

Since the 1950s the number of lives and the amount of money lost to floods have declined, despite little change to the frequency of catastrophic floods, according to the first comprehensive study of European historical records.

Academics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands found that the number of flood deaths across Europe has been falling by about 5 per cent a year for the past six decades. Financial losses to flooding have declined by 2 per cent a year, according to their paper in Nature Communications.