Philip J Ward
Biographic Data
| ID | 5871983 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philip J Ward |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philip J |
| FAMILY NAME | Ward |
| SIGNATURE | WARD P J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7702-7859 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Towards nature-positive engineering: Nature-based solutions in attenuating coastal hydrometeorological hazards
Coastal and deltaic regions are highly vulnerable to hydrometeorological hazards such as storms, flooding, and extreme temperatures—risks that are intensifying under climate change. While hard engineering structures (e.g. levees, seawalls) remain widely used, they can be costly, ecologically disruptive, and may exacerbate hazard complexity. Nature-based solutions (NbS), including mangroves, salt marshes, and other coastal ecosystems, offer sustai…
Uncovering unprecedented storm surges in European and Mediterranean coastlines
Recent research has considerably advanced our ability to model extreme surges. Yet, simulating unprecedented events, i.e. events which are more extreme than observed in historical datasets, remains challenging. To some extent, anticipating such events is possible by accounting for the full range of climate variability. Using a 525-year synthetic dataset from a seasonal reforecast archive, this study uncovers potential unprecedented storm surge ev…
VulneraCity–drivers and dynamics of urban vulnerability based on a global systematic literature review
Globally, urban disaster risk is being affected by changing patterns of natural hazards due to climate change and rapid urbanization. While we have a relatively good understanding of the hazard and exposure in cities, we know little about their vulnerability. In this study, we investigate the drivers and dynamics of urban vulnerability for six different natural hazards by conducting a systematic literature review on the peer-reviewed scientific l…
Compound and consecutive drought-flood events at a global scale
Flooding during or after droughts poses significant challenges to disaster risk management. However, interactions between droughts and floods are often overlooked as studies typically analyse these events in isolation. Here we explore historical occurrences of compound and consecutive drought-flood events and drought effects on flood severity and timing by analysing global datasets of hydrometeorological and biophysical variables for 8255 catchme…
Challenges in assessing and managing multi-hazard risks: A European stakeholders perspective
The latest evidence suggests that multi-hazards and their interrelationships (e.g., triggering, compound, and consecutive hazards) are becoming more frequent across Europe, underlying a need for resilience building by moving from single-hazard-focused to multi-hazard risk assessment and management. Although significant advancements were made in our understanding of these events, mainstream practice is still focused on risks due to single hazards …
Quantifying impact-relevant heatwave durations
Heatwaves are weather hazards that can influence societal and natural systems. Recently, heatwaves have increased in frequency, duration, and intensity, and this trend is projected to continue as a consequence of climate change. The study of heatwaves is hampered by the lack of a common definition, which limits comparability between studies. This applies in particular to the considered time scale for utilised metrics. Here, we study which duratio…
Adaptive risk management strategies for governments under future climate and socioeconomic change: An application to riverine flood risk at the global level
Climate-related disaster risks pose a threat to sustainable development today and in the future. Major global agendas, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals, address ways of developing effective management strategies for tackling such risks. Risk management is increasingly focusing on low probability but high impact events, next to the more traditional attention on expected losses. We focus…
The effect of surge on riverine flood hazard and impact in deltas globally
Current global riverine flood risk studies assume a constant mean sea level boundary. In reality high sea levels can propagate up a river, impede high river discharge, thus leading to elevated water levels. Riverine flood risk in deltas may therefore be underestimated. This paper presents the first global scale assessment of the joint influence of riverine and coastal drivers of flooding in deltas. We show that if storm surge is ignored, flood de…
Hard or soft flood adaptation? Advantages of a hybrid strategy for Shanghai
Flood risk is expected to increase in coastal cities, particularly in Asian megacities such as Shanghai. This paper presents an integrated modeling framework to simulate changes in the flood risk in Shanghai and provide a cost-benefit analysis of multiple adaptation strategies used to reduce risk. The results show that the potential flood risk will increase dramatically as a result of sea level rise, land subsidence, and socioeconomic development…
Disaster risk, climate change, and poverty: Assessing the global exposure of poor people to floods and droughts
People living in poverty are particularly vulnerable to shocks, including those caused by natural disasters such as floods and droughts. This paper analyses household survey data and hydrological riverine flood and drought data for 52 countries to find out whether poor people are disproportionally exposed to floods and droughts, and how this exposure may change in a future climate. We find that poor people are often disproportionally exposed to d…
Identification of symmetric and asymmetric responses in seasonal streamflow globally to Enso phase
The phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has large-ranging effects on streamflow and hydrologic conditions globally. While many studies have evaluated this relationship through correlation analysis between annual streamflow and ENSO indices, an assessment of potential asymmetric relationships between ENSO and streamflow is lacking. Here, we evaluate seasonal variations in streamflow by ENSO phase to identify asymmetric (AR) and symmet…
A first collective validation of global fluvial flood models for major floods in Nigeria and Mozambique
Global flood models (GFMs) are becoming increasingly important for disaster risk management internationally. However, these models have had little validation against observed flood events, making it difficult to compare model performance. In this paper, we introduce the first collective validation of multiple GFMs against the same events and we analyse how different model structures influence performance. We identify three hydraulically diverse r…
Dependence between high sea-level and high river discharge increases flood hazard in global deltas and estuaries
When river and coastal floods coincide, their impacts are often worse than when they occur in isolation; such floods are examples of 'compound events'. To better understand the impacts of these compound events, we require an improved understanding of the dependence between coastal and river flooding on a global scale. Therefore, in this letter, we: provide the first assessment and mapping of the dependence between observed high sea-levels and hig…
Human impact parameterizations in global hydrological models improve estimates of monthly discharges and hydrological extremes: A multi-model validation study
Human activities have a profound influence on river discharge, hydrological extremes, and water-related hazards. In this study, we compare the results of five state-of-the-art global hydrological models (GHMs) with observations to examine the role of human impact parameterizations (HIP) in the simulation of the mean, high, and low flows. The analysis is performed for 471 gauging stations across the globe and for the period 1971-2010. We find that…
The role of climate variability in extreme floods in Europe
Climate variability is shown to be an important driver of spatial and temporal changes in hydrometereological variables in Europe. However, the influence of climate variability on flood damage has received little attention. We investigated the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the East Atlantic pattern (EA) during their neutral, positive, and negative phases, to understand their relationships with four…
The credibility challenge for global fluvial flood risk analysis
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Over the hills and further away from coast: Global geospatial patterns of human and environment over the 20th–21st centuries
Proximity to the coast and elevation are important geographical considerations for human settlement. Little is known, however, about how spatial variation in these factors exactly relates to human settlements and activities, and how this has developed over time. Such knowledge is important for identifying vulnerable regions that are at risk from phenomena such as food shortages and water stress. Human activities are a key driving force in global …
Towards a global water scarcity risk assessment framework: Incorporation of probability distributions and hydro-climatic variability
Changing hydro-climatic and socioeconomic conditions increasingly put pressure on fresh water resources and are expected to aggravate water scarcity conditions towards the future. Despite numerous calls for risk-based water scarcity assessments, a global-scale framework that includes UNISDR's definition of risk does not yet exist. This study provides a first step towards such a risk-based assessment, applying a Gamma distribution to estimate wate…
Declining vulnerability to river floods and the global benefits of adaptation
Significance Understanding the vulnerability of societies around the world is crucial for understanding historical trends in flood risk and for producing accurate projections of fatalities and losses. We reproduced historical river flood occurrence using daily climate data for the period 1980–2010 and quantified the natural and socioeconomic contributions to flood risk trends. We show that the fatalities and losses as a share of the exposed popul…
Changing mechanism of global water scarcity events: Impacts of socioeconomic changes and inter-annual hydro-climatic variability
Assessing flood risk at the global scale: Model setup, results, and sensitivity
Globally, economic losses from flooding exceeded $19 billion in 2012, and are rising rapidly. Hence, there is an increasing need for global-scale flood risk assessments, also within the context of integrated global assessments. We have developed and validated a model cascade for producing global flood risk maps, based on numerous flood return-periods. Validation results indicate that the model simulates interannual fluctuations in flood impacts w…
Governance of flood risk management in a time of climate change: The cases of Jakarta and Rotterdam
More than half the world's population lives in cities, and over two-thirds of the world's cities will be exposed to flooding within the next 30 years due to factors including climate change, land subsidence, sea level rise, and socio-economic development. Traditionally, flood management has concentrated on providing protection against floods using technical measures, but there is currently an international shift towards more integrated flood risk…
Lost food, wasted resources: Global food supply chain losses and their impacts on freshwater, cropland, and fertiliser use
Reducing food losses and waste is considered to be one of the most promising measures to improve food security in the coming decades. Food losses also affect our use of resources, such as freshwater, cropland, and fertilisers. In this paper we estimate the global food supply losses due to lost and wasted food crops, and the resources used to produce them. We also quantify the potential food supply and resource savings that could be made by reduci…
Global exposure to river and coastal flooding: Long term trends and changes
Partial costs of global climate change adaptation for the supply of raw industrial and municipal water: A methodology and application
Despite growing recognition of the importance of climate change adaptation, few global estimates of the costs involved are available for the water supply sector. We present a methodology for estimating partial global and regional adaptation costs for raw industrial and domestic water supply, for a limited number of adaptation strategies, and apply the method using results of two climate models. In this paper, adaptation costs are defined as those…
Global exposure to river and coastal flooding: Long term trends and changes
Hard or soft flood adaptation? Advantages of a hybrid strategy for Shanghai
Flood risk is expected to increase in coastal cities, particularly in Asian megacities such as Shanghai. This paper presents an integrated modeling framework to simulate changes in the flood risk in Shanghai and provide a cost-benefit analysis of multiple adaptation strategies used to reduce risk. The results show that the potential flood risk will increase dramatically as a result of sea level rise, land subsidence, and socioeconomic development…
Changing mechanism of global water scarcity events: Impacts of socioeconomic changes and inter-annual hydro-climatic variability
Governance of flood risk management in a time of climate change: The cases of Jakarta and Rotterdam
More than half the world's population lives in cities, and over two-thirds of the world's cities will be exposed to flooding within the next 30 years due to factors including climate change, land subsidence, sea level rise, and socio-economic development. Traditionally, flood management has concentrated on providing protection against floods using technical measures, but there is currently an international shift towards more integrated flood risk…
Adaptive risk management strategies for governments under future climate and socioeconomic change: An application to riverine flood risk at the global level
Climate-related disaster risks pose a threat to sustainable development today and in the future. Major global agendas, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals, address ways of developing effective management strategies for tackling such risks. Risk management is increasingly focusing on low probability but high impact events, next to the more traditional attention on expected losses. We focus…
The Politics of Religion: Thomas Cromwell and the Reformation in Calais, 1534–40
Partial costs of global climate change adaptation for the supply of raw industrial and municipal water: A methodology and application
Despite growing recognition of the importance of climate change adaptation, few global estimates of the costs involved are available for the water supply sector. We present a methodology for estimating partial global and regional adaptation costs for raw industrial and domestic water supply, for a limited number of adaptation strategies, and apply the method using results of two climate models. In this paper, adaptation costs are defined as those…
Is physical water scarcity a new phenomenon? Global assessment of water shortage over the last two millennia
In this letter we analyse the temporal development of physical population-driven water scarcity, i.e. water shortage, over the period 0 AD to 2005 AD. This was done using population data derived from the HYDE dataset, and water resource availability based on the WaterGAP model results for the period 1961-90. Changes in historical water resources availability were simulated with the STREAM model, forced by climate output data of the ECBilt-CLIO-VE…
Lost food, wasted resources: Global food supply chain losses and their impacts on freshwater, cropland, and fertiliser use
Reducing food losses and waste is considered to be one of the most promising measures to improve food security in the coming decades. Food losses also affect our use of resources, such as freshwater, cropland, and fertilisers. In this paper we estimate the global food supply losses due to lost and wasted food crops, and the resources used to produce them. We also quantify the potential food supply and resource savings that could be made by reduci…
Global exposure to river and coastal flooding: Long term trends and changes
Assessing flood risk at the global scale: Model setup, results, and sensitivity
Globally, economic losses from flooding exceeded $19 billion in 2012, and are rising rapidly. Hence, there is an increasing need for global-scale flood risk assessments, also within the context of integrated global assessments. We have developed and validated a model cascade for producing global flood risk maps, based on numerous flood return-periods. Validation results indicate that the model simulates interannual fluctuations in flood impacts w…
Governance of flood risk management in a time of climate change: The cases of Jakarta and Rotterdam
More than half the world's population lives in cities, and over two-thirds of the world's cities will be exposed to flooding within the next 30 years due to factors including climate change, land subsidence, sea level rise, and socio-economic development. Traditionally, flood management has concentrated on providing protection against floods using technical measures, but there is currently an international shift towards more integrated flood risk…
Declining vulnerability to river floods and the global benefits of adaptation
Significance Understanding the vulnerability of societies around the world is crucial for understanding historical trends in flood risk and for producing accurate projections of fatalities and losses. We reproduced historical river flood occurrence using daily climate data for the period 1980–2010 and quantified the natural and socioeconomic contributions to flood risk trends. We show that the fatalities and losses as a share of the exposed popul…
Changing mechanism of global water scarcity events: Impacts of socioeconomic changes and inter-annual hydro-climatic variability
The credibility challenge for global fluvial flood risk analysis
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Over the hills and further away from coast: Global geospatial patterns of human and environment over the 20th–21st centuries
Proximity to the coast and elevation are important geographical considerations for human settlement. Little is known, however, about how spatial variation in these factors exactly relates to human settlements and activities, and how this has developed over time. Such knowledge is important for identifying vulnerable regions that are at risk from phenomena such as food shortages and water stress. Human activities are a key driving force in global …
Towards a global water scarcity risk assessment framework: Incorporation of probability distributions and hydro-climatic variability
Changing hydro-climatic and socioeconomic conditions increasingly put pressure on fresh water resources and are expected to aggravate water scarcity conditions towards the future. Despite numerous calls for risk-based water scarcity assessments, a global-scale framework that includes UNISDR's definition of risk does not yet exist. This study provides a first step towards such a risk-based assessment, applying a Gamma distribution to estimate wate…
The role of climate variability in extreme floods in Europe
Climate variability is shown to be an important driver of spatial and temporal changes in hydrometereological variables in Europe. However, the influence of climate variability on flood damage has received little attention. We investigated the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the East Atlantic pattern (EA) during their neutral, positive, and negative phases, to understand their relationships with four…
Disaster risk, climate change, and poverty: Assessing the global exposure of poor people to floods and droughts
People living in poverty are particularly vulnerable to shocks, including those caused by natural disasters such as floods and droughts. This paper analyses household survey data and hydrological riverine flood and drought data for 52 countries to find out whether poor people are disproportionally exposed to floods and droughts, and how this exposure may change in a future climate. We find that poor people are often disproportionally exposed to d…
Identification of symmetric and asymmetric responses in seasonal streamflow globally to Enso phase
The phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has large-ranging effects on streamflow and hydrologic conditions globally. While many studies have evaluated this relationship through correlation analysis between annual streamflow and ENSO indices, an assessment of potential asymmetric relationships between ENSO and streamflow is lacking. Here, we evaluate seasonal variations in streamflow by ENSO phase to identify asymmetric (AR) and symmet…
A first collective validation of global fluvial flood models for major floods in Nigeria and Mozambique
Global flood models (GFMs) are becoming increasingly important for disaster risk management internationally. However, these models have had little validation against observed flood events, making it difficult to compare model performance. In this paper, we introduce the first collective validation of multiple GFMs against the same events and we analyse how different model structures influence performance. We identify three hydraulically diverse r…
Dependence between high sea-level and high river discharge increases flood hazard in global deltas and estuaries
When river and coastal floods coincide, their impacts are often worse than when they occur in isolation; such floods are examples of 'compound events'. To better understand the impacts of these compound events, we require an improved understanding of the dependence between coastal and river flooding on a global scale. Therefore, in this letter, we: provide the first assessment and mapping of the dependence between observed high sea-levels and hig…
Human impact parameterizations in global hydrological models improve estimates of monthly discharges and hydrological extremes: A multi-model validation study
Human activities have a profound influence on river discharge, hydrological extremes, and water-related hazards. In this study, we compare the results of five state-of-the-art global hydrological models (GHMs) with observations to examine the role of human impact parameterizations (HIP) in the simulation of the mean, high, and low flows. The analysis is performed for 471 gauging stations across the globe and for the period 1971-2010. We find that…
The effect of surge on riverine flood hazard and impact in deltas globally
Current global riverine flood risk studies assume a constant mean sea level boundary. In reality high sea levels can propagate up a river, impede high river discharge, thus leading to elevated water levels. Riverine flood risk in deltas may therefore be underestimated. This paper presents the first global scale assessment of the joint influence of riverine and coastal drivers of flooding in deltas. We show that if storm surge is ignored, flood de…
Hard or soft flood adaptation? Advantages of a hybrid strategy for Shanghai
Flood risk is expected to increase in coastal cities, particularly in Asian megacities such as Shanghai. This paper presents an integrated modeling framework to simulate changes in the flood risk in Shanghai and provide a cost-benefit analysis of multiple adaptation strategies used to reduce risk. The results show that the potential flood risk will increase dramatically as a result of sea level rise, land subsidence, and socioeconomic development…
Adaptive risk management strategies for governments under future climate and socioeconomic change: An application to riverine flood risk at the global level
Climate-related disaster risks pose a threat to sustainable development today and in the future. Major global agendas, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals, address ways of developing effective management strategies for tackling such risks. Risk management is increasingly focusing on low probability but high impact events, next to the more traditional attention on expected losses. We focus…
Quantifying impact-relevant heatwave durations
Heatwaves are weather hazards that can influence societal and natural systems. Recently, heatwaves have increased in frequency, duration, and intensity, and this trend is projected to continue as a consequence of climate change. The study of heatwaves is hampered by the lack of a common definition, which limits comparability between studies. This applies in particular to the considered time scale for utilised metrics. Here, we study which duratio…
VulneraCity–drivers and dynamics of urban vulnerability based on a global systematic literature review
Globally, urban disaster risk is being affected by changing patterns of natural hazards due to climate change and rapid urbanization. While we have a relatively good understanding of the hazard and exposure in cities, we know little about their vulnerability. In this study, we investigate the drivers and dynamics of urban vulnerability for six different natural hazards by conducting a systematic literature review on the peer-reviewed scientific l…
Compound and consecutive drought-flood events at a global scale
Flooding during or after droughts poses significant challenges to disaster risk management. However, interactions between droughts and floods are often overlooked as studies typically analyse these events in isolation. Here we explore historical occurrences of compound and consecutive drought-flood events and drought effects on flood severity and timing by analysing global datasets of hydrometeorological and biophysical variables for 8255 catchme…
Challenges in assessing and managing multi-hazard risks: A European stakeholders perspective
The latest evidence suggests that multi-hazards and their interrelationships (e.g., triggering, compound, and consecutive hazards) are becoming more frequent across Europe, underlying a need for resilience building by moving from single-hazard-focused to multi-hazard risk assessment and management. Although significant advancements were made in our understanding of these events, mainstream practice is still focused on risks due to single hazards …
Environmental Science (22 works) · Geography (22 works) · Flood Risk Assessment and Management (19 works) · Climate change (18 works) · Flood myth (15 works) · Environmental resource management (12 works) · Population (11 works) · Ecology (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Hydrology and Watershed Management Studies (9 works)