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Climate change has led to concerns about increasing river floods resulting from the greater water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere 1. These concerns are reinforced by evidence of increasing economic losses associated with flooding in many parts of the world, including Europe 2. Any changes in river floods would have lasting implications for the design of flood protection measures and flood risk zoning. However, existing studies have been unable to identify a consistent continental-scale climatic-change signal in flood discharge observations in Europe 3, because of the limited spatial coverage and number of hydrometric stations. Here we demonstrate clear regional patterns of both increases and decreases in observed river flood discharges in the past five decades in Europe, which are manifestations of a changing climate. Our results—arising from the most complete database of European flooding so far …