Team of researchers led by Lorenzo Alfieri (European Commission – Joint Research Centre, Italy) and Richard Betts (University of Exeter and Met Office, UK) published a new study Multi-Model Projections of River Flood Risk in Europe under Global Warming. They used impact models to assess the risks of large-scale flooding in Eastern Europe. The authors incorporated changes to future climate, expected damage, and population that will be affected in the flooding zones. The study tackles the problem of quantifying a cost of climate change. Although we know human activities contribute to climate change by causing changes in Earth's atmosphere, we do not know what are the costs of inaction compared to costs of climate action. The authors calculated expected economic damage from future flooding for the three different temperature increases assuming global warming scenarios of 1.5, 2, and 3 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. They found that regardless of which model was used, there will be significant economic damage (in the range of tens to hundreds of billions of Euros per year) in the warming future. Moreover, population affected in Europe by flooding will grow significantly in the future (up to 1 million people). Professor Betts said: “Our results give the clearest picture yet of climate change increasing the risk of flooding. We did two new sets of model calculations and compared them with a third set from previous work. With all three methods, the result is higher flood risk in Western and Central Europe under a warmer climate, even at just 1.5 degrees C global warming.”