Insider Monkey

25 Countries With the Highest Flood Risk

Ramish Cheema
9 min read

In This Article:

In this piece, we will take a look at 25 countries with the highest flood risk. If you want to skip our introduction to global warming and the catastrophe insurance industry, then take a look at 5 Countries With the Highest Flood Risk.

The threat of flooding has been exacerbated by changes in global temperatures. Floods have devastated countries in Asia and North America, with the latest flood in New York overwhelming a city with some of the biggest infrastructure in the world. However, while floods were restricted to one city in this case, 2022's floods in Pakistan caused widespread devastation and created a humanitarian crisis that remains unaddressed a year later.

Yet, even as people in Pakistan wait for the government to help with reconstruction efforts, super floods, it appears, might be a regular feature of modern day living. Each mega flood, such as the one that took place in Libya kills thousands of people and displaces even more. The devastation in the African country is particularly striking since while roughly two thousand people were estimated to have died in Pakistan, the Libyan death toll sits at nearly twenty thousand lives lost - an occurrence also fueled by the failure of two dams that were expected to protect 90,000 people according to the Associated Press. However, recovery from such large scale events takes years and is often complicated by corruption and misgovernance in the countries that might suffer from their consequences.

As an example, a year after the devastating flood and $200 million in U.S. aid, more than 1.5 million children in Pakistan are still at risk of severe malnutrition. Foreign aid to developing countries is often siphoned off or spent inefficiently, and in Pakistan's case, the money spent on reconstruction and rehabilitation for the flood victims appears to have had a negligible impact on feeding those who need food the most. This is because data from the United Nations Children's Foundation (UNICEF) shows that at the outset of the devastating humanitarian crisis, 1.6 million children were severely malnourished, so after a year, more than 93% of them are still suffering.

These megascale human disasters are caused by climate change and are part of the broader phenomenon of global warming that is a result of the stunning growth in the use of carbon based fuels for industrial growth. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a lunar cycle coupled with elevated sea levels due to global warming will cause every major U.S. coast to experience high tide floods from 2023 onwards. Global warming causes the glacier ice caps to melt, and the water then flows into the sea at sufficiently large levels to cause floods. However, since temperatures are now higher, less water is frozen back, leading to a disruption in the delicate balance of the Earth's ecosystem.

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