As flood impacts are increasing in large parts of the world, understanding the primary drivers of changes in risk is essential for effective adaptation. To gain more knowledge on the basis of empirical case studies, we analyze eight paired floods, that is, consecutive flood events that occurred in the same region, with the second flood causing significantly lower damage. These success stories of risk reduction were selected across different socioeconomic and hydro‐climatic contexts. The potential of societies to adapt is uncovered by describing triggered societal changes, as well as formal measures and spontaneous processes that reduced flood risk. This novel approach has the potential to build the basis for an international data collection and analysis effort to better understand and attribute changes in risk due to hydrological extremes in the framework of the IAHSs Panta Rhei initiative. Across all case studies, we find that lower damage caused by the second event was mainly due to significant reductions in vulnerability, for example, via raised risk awareness, preparedness, and improvements of organizational emergency management. Thus, vulnerability reduction plays an essential role for successful adaptation. Our work shows that there is a high potential to adapt, but there remains the challenge to stimulate measures that reduce vulnerability and risk in periods in which extreme events do not occur.

Many urban areas experience both fluvial and pluvial floods, because locations next to rivers are preferred settlement areas and the predominantly sealed urban surface prevents infiltration and facilitates surface inundation. The latter problem is enhanced in cities with insufficient or non-existent sewer systems. While there are a number of approaches to analyse either a fluvial or pluvial flood hazard, studies of a combined fluvial and pluvial flood hazard are hardly available. Thus this study aims to analyse a fluvial and a pluvial flood hazard individually, but also to develop a method for the analysis of a combined pluvial and fluvial flood hazard. This combined fluvial–pluvial flood hazard analysis is performed taking Can Tho city, the largest city in the Vietnamese part of the Mekong Delta, as an example. In this tropical environment the annual monsoon triggered floods of the Mekong River, which can coincide with heavy local convective precipitation events, causing both fluvial and pluvial flooding at the same time. The fluvial flood hazard was estimated with a copula-based bivariate extreme value statistic for the gauge Kratie at the upper boundary of the Mekong Delta and a large-scale hydrodynamic model of the Mekong Delta. This provided the boundaries for 2-dimensional hydrodynamic inundation simulation for Can Tho city. The pluvial hazard was estimated by a peak-over-threshold frequency estimation based on local rain gauge data and a stochastic rainstorm generator. Inundation for all flood scenarios was simulated by a 2-dimensional hydrodynamic model implemented on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for time-efficient flood propagation modelling. The combined fluvial–pluvial flood scenarios were derived by adding rainstorms to the fluvial flood events during the highest fluvial water levels. The probabilities of occurrence of the combined events were determined assuming independence of the two flood types and taking the seasonality and probability of coincidence into account. All hazards – fluvial, pluvial and combined – were accompanied by an uncertainty estimation taking into account the natural variability of the flood events. This resulted in probabilistic flood hazard maps showing the maximum inundation depths for a selected set of probabilities of occurrence, with maps showing the expectation (median) and the uncertainty by percentile maps. The results are critically discussed and their usage in flood risk management are outlined.

Sediment dynamics play a major role in the agricultural and fishery productivity of the Mekong Delta. However, the understanding of sediment dynamics in the delta, one of the most complex river deltas in the world, is very limited. This is a consequence of its large extent, the intricate system of rivers, channels and floodplains, and the scarcity of observations. This study quantifies, for the first time, the suspended sediment transport and sediment deposition in the whole Mekong Delta. To this end, a quasi-2D hydrodynamic model is combined with a cohesive sediment transport model. The combined model is calibrated using six objective functions to represent the different aspects of the hydraulic and sediment transport components. The model is calibrated for the extreme flood season in 2011 and shows good performance for 2 validation years with very different flood characteristics. It is shown how sediment transport and sediment deposition is differentiated from Kratie at the entrance of the delta on its way to the coast. The main factors influencing the spatial sediment dynamics are the river and channel system, dike rings, sluice gate operations, the magnitude of the floods, and tidal influences. The superposition of these factors leads to high spatial variability of sediment transport, in particular in the Vietnamese floodplains. Depending on the flood magnitude, annual sediment loads reaching the coast vary from 48 to 60% of the sediment load at Kratie. Deposited sediment varies from 19 to 23% of the annual load at Kratie in Cambodian floodplains, and from 1 to 6% in the compartmented and diked floodplains in Vietnam. Annual deposited nutrients (N, P, K), which are associated with the sediment deposition, provide on average more than 50% of mineral fertilizers typically applied for rice crops in non-flooded ring dike floodplains in Vietnam. Through the quantification of sediment and related nutrient input, the presented study provides a quantitative basis for estimating the benefits of annual Mekong floods for agriculture and fishery, and is an important piece of information with regard to the assessment of the impacts of deltaic subsidence and climate-change-related sea level rise on delta morphology.