Historical impact records as a complementary source of evidence for coastal flood risk assessment in the Canary Islands

Abstract. Despite major advances in characterizing coastal flood hazards, historical impact datasets remain scarce for many island regions, limiting the assessment of coastal flood risk. This study presents the first archipelago-wide inventory of damaging coastal events in the Canary Islands, integrating historical newspaper archives with insurance compensation records from the Spanish Insurance Compensation Consortium (CCS). The database documents 191 unique wave- and tide-induced events between 1980 and 2025, including their mechanisms, spatial distribution, affected assets, and reported impacts.

More than 94 % of events coincided with offshore wave conditions exceeding the 90th percentile (P90), and 29.5 % were associated with North Atlantic swell. Impacts clustered in recurrent hotspots, with roads and promenades, structural elements, public and recreational spaces, and coastal protection structures among the most frequently affected assets. Comparison with official flood-risk mapping showed that 69.6 % of impact locations fell within 500 m of Areas of Potential Significant Flood Risk (ARPSIs); however, several damaging events predated the formal designation of these areas by decades. Integrating documentary, insurance, and physical hazard information further shows that no single source fully captures damaging coastal flooding: newspaper coverage was more closely related to the number of insurance claims than to aggregate indemnified losses, while insurance records remained constrained by coverage and claim behavior.

The resulting database provides an empirical basis for coastal damage modelling, vulnerability assessment, and adaptation planning. Building on the limitations identified in this study, future work should focus on normalizing hotspot recurrence and developing quantitative damage functions linking wave conditions to asset-level impacts, paving the way for a region-specific coastal damage scale for the Canary Islands.