Climate and land use change impacts on flood flows in Greece

Climate and land use changes are considered to be the most important anthropogenic factors that influence the flow and consequently the flood regime of river basins. The paper herein is focusing on the Pinios catchment located in Central Greece. Being an agricultural area with important annual crop production, the need to assess the magnitude of flooding in environmentally changed conditions is straightforward. The study uses a scenario based approach for both the climate and the land use change conditions. The flows with a return period of 10, 20, 100 and 1000 years are examined. The altered flows due to climate and land use changes, indicate an increase of the flood magnitude for all the return periods examined. In any case, the study outlines the need for revised flood mitigation procedures that will take into account the environmentally changed conditions.