Ali Pourzangbar

1 Introduction Extreme weather events, including floods, are the second most perceived immediate risk (WEF, 2025). Every year, floods affect about 250 million people and cause roughly USD 40 billion in damages and, according to the OECD (2016), there is a growing insurance gap and fiscal burden on governments in the aftermath of increasingly frequent severe floods.

1 Introduction Annually, floods affect approximately 200 million people (Ritchie and Rosado 2024) and are responsible for over half of the damage from natural disasters in the last 50 years (Bates 2021). In Germany, the 2021 extreme flood caused at least 180 deaths and EUR 46 billion of estimated loss (Mohr et al. 2022).