Population, land use and economic exposure estimates for Europe at 100 m resolution from 1870 to 2020

Abstract

Understanding the influence of climate change on past extreme weather impacts is a vital research task. However, the effects of climate change are obscured in the observed impact data series due to the rapid evolution of the social and economic circumstances in which the events occurred. The HANZE v2.0 (Historical Analysis of Natural HaZards in Europe) dataset presented in this study quantifies the evolution of key socioeconomic drivers in Europe since 1870, namely land use, population, economic activity and assets. It consists of algorithms to reallocate baseline (2011) land use and population for any given year based on a large collection of historical subnational- and national-level statistics, and then disaggregate data on production and tangible assets by economic sector into a high-resolution grid. Raster datasets generated by the model enable reconstructing exposure within the footprint of any extreme event both at the time of occurrence and anytime between 1870 and 2020. This allows the separation of the effects of climate change from the effects of exposure change.