Abstract
Wetland conservation is a potentially effective but undervalued strategy in managing growing flood risk under climate change. Here we address this challenge by quantifying the effects of wetlands in reducing riverine flood losses across the USA using flood insurance claims data and annually observed changes in wetland area between 1985 and 2023. We find that claim amounts for individual properties increase by 0.01–0.03% per hectare of upstream wetland loss. Based on these effects, we estimate that wetland loss since 1985 has increased flood insurance claims by a total of US$10.1 billion or 9.0%. We also calculate the marginal value of wetlands in reducing riverine flood losses for each subwatershed in the USA. In 16% of subwatersheds, the marginal benefits of flood mitigation outweigh the marginal costs of land conservation. Policymakers can use this information for conducting regulatory impact assessments, designing land-use policies and pricing flood insurance.
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Data availability
All HUC12-level data shown in Fig. 3 are included in the Supplementary Information. All input datasets used for the empirical analysis are publicly available. The NFIP policies and claims data can be found at https://www.fema.gov/about/openfema/data-sets#nfip. The NLCD data can be found at https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/67a0d26bd34eae8ba44317c9. The PRISM precipitation data can be found at https://prism.oregonstate.edu/recent/. The Watershed Boundary Dataset can be found at https://www.usgs.gov/national-hydrography/access-national-hydrography-products. If access to any of these datasets is no longer available, the corresponding author will provide them upon request. EAL data from Wing et al.47 were accessed from a direct request to First Street Technology. Land value data from Gold et al.49 were accessed from a direct request to the corresponding author. Land value data from Nolte are available via Dryad at https://datadryad.org/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.np5hqbzq9 (ref. 50). Data from the American Community Survey were accessed using the Python ‘census’ package, a simple wrapper for the US Census Bureau’s application programming interface.
Code availability
The Python code used for the analysis is archived and publicly available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19699730 (ref. 94).
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Acknowledgements
We thank K. Boicourt, C. Samoray and A. Pollack for providing thoughtful comments and feedback on earlier versions of the paper. We thank S. Binder for providing access to the land value dataset and J. Porter for providing the EAL dataset. J.D.G. and A.C.G. were supported by general operational funds from the Environmental Defense Fund. The views expressed in this article are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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J.D.G.: conceptualization, methodology, software, formal analysis, investigation, data curation, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, visualization. A.C.G.: conceptualization, methodology, data curation, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, visualization. H.M.G.: conceptualization, methodology, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing.
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Gourevitch, J.D., Gold, A.C. & Garcia, H.M. The economic value of wetlands in reducing riverine flood losses in the USA.
Nat Water (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00656-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00656-3
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