Valencia, a city and province in south-east Spain, became synonymous with disaster in October 2024 when floods killed at least 231 people. Extreme rainfall will happen more often as the climate warms and the cost to coastal cities like Valencia is expected to reach up to US$63 billion (£50 billion) annually by 2050.
We are an urban planner and environmental scientist who analysed what made these floods so destructive. We drew from our experience of studying urban flooding in India – Chennai in 2015 and Kochi in 2018 – and found something common in all cases: all three cities had lost substantial tracts of neighbouring wetlands.
