Pluvial flood in Copenhagen August 2014

When I started my PhD study in 2012, everyone said: I see, you live in Copenhagen – over there floods are of great interest. Copenhagen was flooded in August 2010, July 2011 and once more in August 2011. My PhD topic (urban flooding in a changing climate) was of course partly inspired by these three floods, but also by the need to create better cities in the future. We need greener cities and more resilient stormwater systems. This was in 2012 and the interest of flooding in Sweden was rather weak.

Then, in 2014, the rain fell. After a few hours of heavy rainfall, floods where suddenly on everyone lips. Malmö was hit by a costly and frightening flood event. Now people had their own experience of what a flood could be. It is not any longer a problem “over there”, in Copenhagen. It takes only 35 minutes to go from central Copenhagen to Malmö. Nevertheless, it took the flood risk awareness more than three years to cross the bridge.

Cars flooded in Copenhagen 2014

Gothenburg have seen similar flood events and they seem to be aware of the problem. During a conference in Gothenburg, someone discussed why the national authorities in Sweden still seems so unaware of the pluvial flood risk. As this person mentioned: “We have still not seen a major flood event in a bigger Swedish city – read: Stockholm!” I guess this summarises the problem with risk awareness. It is unbelievable hard to understand the risk of flooding before you have seen one yourself in your own town.