CIMA Research Foundation was commissioned by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) in 2012 to provide scientific advice on hydrogeological risk for the Global Assessment Report (GAR).

The task consisted in identifying the influence of climate change on extreme events for the estimation of the flow rates. For this purpose, our researchers have implemented the Continuum hydrological model worldwide, using historical analyses of global weather variables from 1979 to 2008. By combining the Continuum model with climate forecasts, flow statistics have been derived to understand how climate change scenarios will influence the extreme flow scenarios in the future. This made it possible to estimate the expected flood risk in the coming years in different parts of the world.