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The 6th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report (IPCC, 2021) states that extreme precipitation, pluvial and fluvial floods have been observed to increase in Western and Central Europe and will increase with high confidence in case global warming reaches 2 C, expected to occur by mid-century in case greenhouse gas emissions reduction do not take place quickly. However, attribution of specific local extreme precipitation events to climate change remains difficult due to the high year-to-year or decade-to-decade variability of extreme precipitation. Furthermore, the limited availability of finely-resolved climate model simulations and long-term observations provides challenges to attribution studies of local-scale events.

Extreme rainfall occurred in Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and neighbouring countries during the period 12 to 15 July 2021, leading to severe flooding particularly in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany and along the river Meuse and some of its tributaries in Belgium and the Netherlands. The flooding resulted in at least 184 fatalities in Germany1 and 38 in Belgium2 and considerable damage to infrastructure, including houses, roads, communication, motorways and railway lines as well as bridges. A variety of livelihoods were severely disrupted by the flood event, including local businesses in the affected regions and wine growers that make up the backbone of the Ahr Valley region (Tafel and Szolnoki, 2020). Road closures left some places inaccessible for days, cutting off some villages from evacuation routes and other forms of emergency response. The most affected …