The effect of climate change on the flood risk – example of a section of the river

The question of a possible climatic change and the associated effects on human society is presently a major topic of public discussion. The observed weather phenomena of recent years, in particular precipitation events, make clear that also water management must adapt to changes occurring in the runoff behaviour. In order to investigate these implications, the states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Bavaria as well as the German weather service initiated the joint project KLIWA (climatic change and consequences for water management) in 1999, which was to examine the influence of climatic scenarios. In this joint project so-called climatic factors were determined with which regionally dependent peak discharge quantities for different occurrence probabilities needed to be increased, in order to be able to consider the climatic changes. This contribution points out how climatic change affects, in view of further discharge processes of flood events, flood security as well as potential flood damages. 2 KLIWA Project The design of flood protection installations and the evaluation and examination of the degree of flood protection is based on flood events with a certain probability of occurrence or exceedance. Withi