Also, as people have a life expectancy in the order of 100 years (75 perhaps?), there is a pretty good chance you will experience a 1:100 year event at some point in your life. Also a lot of infrastructure is built for 50-100 year life (or is still used after 100 years, even though it was designed for less).
The 1:100 year safety level should thus be considered a bare minimum for high impact events. In the Netherlands water infrastructure is designed to withstand the 1:10.000 year storm for catastrophic events, and e.g. 1:1.000 year storm for high impact events.
But even with higher safety standards, it is key to design not only for the current climate, but for the future climate over the design life of whatever you are building. Extrapolating 1:10.000 year events from 30 years of observations might seem sketchy already, but with all the uncertainties in climate change predictions is a bit of a stretch.
There's a pretty good chance you'll experience any given 1:100 year event. You're basically guaranteed to experience quite a lot of 1:100 year events, since there are so many options.
The 1:100 year safety level should thus be considered a bare minimum for high impact events. In the Netherlands water infrastructure is designed to withstand the 1:10.000 year storm for catastrophic events, and e.g. 1:1.000 year storm for high impact events.
But even with higher safety standards, it is key to design not only for the current climate, but for the future climate over the design life of whatever you are building. Extrapolating 1:10.000 year events from 30 years of observations might seem sketchy already, but with all the uncertainties in climate change predictions is a bit of a stretch.