EP1 · Floods
The world's large floods since 1985 mapped by footprint and severity, with the yearly rhythm of every event underneath.
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This record is the Dartmouth Flood Observatory's catalogue of significant flood events since 1985, compiled from news, government and remote-sensing reports. Each entry is a single event with a start and end, a set of affected countries, and a cause.
Floods have no single magnitude like an earthquake. The record grades each event on a few axes, and each has a caveat worth knowing.
Floods are the most frequent natural disaster on Earth and, outside a handful of rich markets, among the least insured. That gap is the reason floods belong on a board's risk register, not just a weather report.
The map plots the events with a mapped river basin (about 1,552 of the 5,513 in the record, the only ones the source geolocates); the strip below covers every event by year. Death tolls and displacement here are the source record's figures and understate the documented totals of recent disasters, which the deep-dive episodes correct against post-event studies.
Every large flood in the record, by year. Displacement, not death, is the modern flood signature. The 2024 bar is partial: the record ends 26 February 2024. Source: Dartmouth Flood Observatory.
The full catalogue: country, dates, duration, deaths, displaced and flooded area for every large flood since 1985, sortable and filterable.
A supercharged monsoon put roughly a third of Pakistan under water: 33 million people affected, around 30 billion dollars lost, and less than one percent of it insured.