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Rising extreme sea levels (ESLs) and continued socioeconomic development in coastal zones will lead to increasing future flood risk along the European coastline. We present a comprehensive analysis of future coastal flood risk (CFR) for Europe that separates the impacts of global warming and socioeconomic development. In the absence of further investments in coastal adaptation, the present expected annual damage (EAD) of €1.25 billion is projected to increase by two to three orders of magnitude by the end of the century, ranging between 93 and €961 billion. The current expected annual number of people exposed (EAPE) to coastal flooding of 102,000 is projected to reach 1.52–3.65 million by the end of the century. Climate change is the main driver of the future rise in coastal flood losses, with the importance of coastward migration, urbanization and rising asset values rapidly declining with time. To keep future coastal flood losses constant relative to the size of the economy, flood defence structures need to be installed or reinforced to withstand increases in ESLs that range from 0.5 to 2.5 m.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption to education systems worldwide, increasing pre-existing concerns regarding university students' mental health. Brazil was among the countries most affected by COVID-19 cases and deaths and was considered a pandemic epicenter. This study aimed to investigate Brazilian university students' mental health status and perceived burdens during the COVID-19 pandemic. From November 2021 to March 2022, a cross-sectional and anonymous online survey was conducted among students of a Brazilian federal university. Mental health status (depressive symptoms, alcohol and drug consumption) and social and emotional aspects in the pandemic context (social support, perceived stress, loneliness, resilience, and self-efficacy) were assessed with standardized measures. Students' attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination and perceived burdens of the pandemic were also investigated. A total of N = 2,437 students completed the online survey. The PHQ-9 mean sum score was 12.85 (SD = 7.40), while n = 1,488 (61.10%) participants reported a sum score of 10 or more, indicating clinically relevant depressive symptoms. Further, n = 808 (33.1%) of the total sample reported suicidal thoughts. Levels of depressive symptoms, perceived stress, and loneliness were higher among undergraduate/bachelor students than doctoral students. Almost all participants (97.3%) reported being fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Multiple regression analyses showed that being single, having an income decreased during the pandemic, having a previous mental illness, having a chronic somatic condition, not finding positive aspects in the pandemic, lower self-efficacy, lower social support, lower resilience, and higher experienced loneliness were significantly associated with higher levels of depression. The study showed high levels of depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation among Federal University of Parana students. Therefore, health care providers and universities need to recognize and address mental health issues; psychosocial policies must be enhanced to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on students' mental health and wellbeing.

Coastal flooding related to marine extreme events has severe socioeconomic impacts, and even though the latter are projected to increase under the changing climate, there is a clear deficit of information and predictive capacity related to coastal flood mapping. The present contribution reports on efforts towards a new methodology for mapping coastal flood hazard at European scale, combining (i) the contribution of waves to the total water level; (ii) improved inundation modeling; and (iii) an open, physics-based framework which can be constantly upgraded, whenever new and more accurate data become available. Four inundation approaches of gradually increasing complexity and computational costs were evaluated in terms of their applicability to large-scale coastal flooding mapping: static inundation (SM); a semi-dynamic method, considering the water volume discharge over the dykes (VD); the flood intensity index approach (Iw); and the model LISFLOOD-FP (LFP). A validation test performed against observed flood extents during the Xynthia storm event showed that SM and VD can lead to an overestimation of flood extents by 232 and 209 %, while Iw and LFP showed satisfactory predictive skill. Application at pan-European scale for the present-day 100-year event confirmed that static approaches can overestimate flood extents by 56 % compared to LFP; however, Iw can deliver results of reasonable accuracy in cases when reduced computational costs are a priority. Moreover, omitting the wave contribution in the extreme total water level (TWL) can result in a  ∼  60 % underestimation of the flooded area. The present findings have implications for impact assessment studies, since combination of the estimated inundation maps with population exposure maps revealed differences in the estimated number of people affected within the 20–70 % range.

In recent years, the importance of continental-scale hazard maps for riverine floods has grown. Nowadays, such maps are used for a variety of research and commercial activities, such as evaluating present and future risk scenarios and adaptation strategies, as well as supporting management plans for national and local flood risk. In this paper we present a new set of high-resolution (100 m) hazard maps for river flooding that covers most European countries, as well as all of the river basins entering the Mediterranean and Black Sea in the Caucasus, the Middle East and northern Africa. The new river flood hazard maps represent inundation along 329 000 km of the river network, for six different flood return periods, expanding on the datasets previously available for the region. The input river flow data for the new maps are produced by means of the hydrological model LISFLOOD using new calibration and meteorological data, while inundation simulations are performed with the hydrodynamic model LISFLOOD-FP. In addition, we present here a detailed validation exercise using official hazard maps for Hungary, Italy, Norway, Spain and the UK, which provides a more detailed evaluation of the new dataset compared with previous works in the region. We find that the modelled maps can identify on average two-thirds of reference flood extent, but they also overestimate flood-prone areas with below 1-in-100-year flood probabilities, while for return periods equal to or above 500 years, the maps can correctly identify more than half of flooded areas. Further verification is required in the northern African and eastern Mediterranean regions, in order to better understand the performance of the flood maps in arid areas outside Europe. We attribute the observed skill to a number of shortcomings of the modelling framework, such as the absence of flood protections and rivers with an upstream area below 500 km2 and the limitations in representing river channels and the topography of lowland areas. In addition, the different designs of reference maps (e.g. extent of areas included) affect the correct identification of the areas for the validation, thus penalizing the scores. However, modelled maps achieve comparable results to existing large-scale flood models when using similar parameters for the validation. We conclude that recently released high-resolution elevation datasets, combined with reliable data of river channel geometry, may greatly contribute to improving future versions of continental-scale river flood hazard maps. The new high-resolution database of river flood hazard maps is available for download at https://doi.org/10.2905/1D128B6C-A4EE-4858-9E34-6210707F3C81 (Dottori et al., 2020a).

The development of methods for rapid flood mapping and risk assessment is a key step to increase the usefulness of flood early warning systems and is crucial for effective emergency response and flood impact mitigation. Currently, flood early warning systems rarely include real-time components to assess potential impacts generated by forecasted flood events. To overcome this limitation, this study describes the benchmarking of an operational procedure for rapid flood risk assessment based on predictions issued by the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS). Daily streamflow forecasts produced for major European river networks are translated into event-based flood hazard maps using a large map catalogue derived from high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations. Flood hazard maps are then combined with exposure and vulnerability information, and the impacts of the forecasted flood events are evaluated in terms of flood-prone areas, economic damage and affected population, infrastructures and cities.An extensive testing of the operational procedure has been carried out by analysing the catastrophic floods of May 2014 in Bosnia–Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. The reliability of the flood mapping methodology is tested against satellite-based and report-based flood extent data, while modelled estimates of economic damage and affected population are compared against ground-based estimations. Finally, we evaluate the skill of risk estimates derived from EFAS flood forecasts with different lead times and combinations of probabilistic forecasts. Results highlight the potential of the real-time operational procedure in helping emergency response and management.

This study aims to verify the self-evaluation that people make about their ability to drive and investigate whether there is a difference between self-evaluation and evaluation about their friends’ abilities. To this end, 151 people answered three different questionnaires, one questionnaire about driving abilities (self-evaluation and evaluation of friends), the Driver’s Behavior Questionnaire and a socio-demographic questionnaire The sample consisted of 50.3% of males with a mean age of 25.32 years (sd = 1.66). As a result, self-evaluation was positively correlated with age, evaluation of friend, weekly driving hours, Common Violations, and Aggressive Violations. In addition, there was significant difference between evaluation by sex: males carry out self-assessments in a more positive way. It was also found that people evaluate themselves better than they evaluate their friends. From this research, it is possible to think the target audience that would most benefit from an intervention to reduce self-evaluation, that is, men, people over 24 years old, and people who have more driving experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected students' mental health, increasing pre-existing psychosocial vulnerabilities. University students worldwide have presented differences in their mental health status; however, cross-country studies comparing students' mental health during the pandemic are lacking. To investigate potential differences between university students from Brazil and those from Germany with respect to (a) depressive symptoms and alcohol and drug consumption, (b) social and emotional aspects (loneliness, self-efficacy, perceived stress, social support and resilience) and (c) attitudes towards vaccination. Two online cross-sectional studies were conducted with university students during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil (November 2021 to March 2022) and in Germany (April to May 2022). Depressive symptoms, alcohol consumption, loneliness, self-efficacy, perceived stress, social support, resilience, sociodemographic information and attitudes towards vaccination were assessed. Data were analysed using univariate and bivariate models. The total sample comprised = 7911 university students, with = 2437 from Brazil and = 5474 from Germany. Brazilian students presented significantly more depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts, higher levels of perceived stress, higher frequency of drug or substance consumption, and lower levels of perceived social support and resilience than German students, whereas German students presented higher levels of loneliness than Brazilian students. A more favourable opinion towards vaccinations in general was found among Brazilian students compared with German students. In both countries, low-threshold (online) counselling targeting university students is needed. The differences between the samples could indicate country and/or cultural differences which justify further research in this area.

If, nowadays, the Communities’ welfare lies in new expressions of collaboration between different types of subjects for the achievement of common objectives, cultural consensus becomes the collective transformation tool to promote regeneration interventions of life contexts encouraged by new social innovation ideas such as products, services and models. This research considers five aspects of the social dimension to define energy systems location and their acceptability. In particular: social equity: as a fair distribution of costs and risks throughout society; spatial equity: as a fair distribution of risks and costs throughout the territory; intergenerational equity: as a proper assessment of the risks that would entail current locations for future generations; procedural equity: when the location decisions and the same decision making process are perceived as legitimate by all concerned; equity structural: when the localization process involves all aspects and interests, leaving no one out for their approaches (Murphy and Stanley 2006). In relation to the analyzed aspects, this study suggests a point of view on the role of reasoning and interpreting the social activity of individuals in relation to bottom-up decision-making processes for the formation of cultural consensus when changes in the usual life and environmental contexts occur.

River flood risk in Europe could rise to unprecedented levels due to global warming and continued development in flood-prone areas. Here, we appraise the potential of four key adaptation strategies to reduce flood risk across Europe based on flood risk modelling and cost–benefit analysis. We find that reducing flood peaks using detention areas is economically the most attractive option. In a scenario without climate mitigation (3 °C global warming), they can lower projected flood losses in Europe by 2100 from €44(30–61) billion to €8.1(5.5–10.7) billion per year and lower population exposed by 84% (75–90%) or achieve a risk level comparable to today. The economic investment required over 2020–2100 would provide a return of €4(3.5–6.3) for each €1 invested. The risk reduction potential of strengthening of dykes is somewhat lower, at 70% (59–83%) for a comparable annual investment. Implementing building-based flood proofing and relocation measures is less cost-effective but can reduce impacts in localized areas.With increasing river flooding risk caused by climate and socioeconomic changes, different adaptation strategies can help to improve the resilience to the threat. This Analysis compares four major options, then examines the potential benefits and costs across Europe under different scenarios.