China-Australia Project Contributes to Studies on Climate Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction

Climate change is imposing growing influences on the world, especially these developing countries which suffer most from the damaging impacts of the associating natural disasters such as floods due to climate change.

A China-Australia project is conducted to develop transferable integrated tools for the climate adaptation - disaster risk reduction spectrum, with a focus to help the developing countries with affordable tools, and access to high-quality data and modelling systems related to climate change caused disasters.

Titled "climate change impacts of natural hazards, through remote sensing and computational modelling", the project is led by Prof. CHEN Fang from the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals (CBAS) and the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), together with his counterpart, Prof. Mahesh Prakash from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).

Taking different cities from China, Australia and Thailand as study cases, the project uses flooding and climate related flood adaptation to demonstrate the development of the integrated capability in remote sensing and computational modelling. Case studies in different countries demonstrate the usefulness of the integrated flood modelling and mitigation approach.

Distribution map of simulated flood extents in Greater Bangkok, Thailand. (Image by AIR)

By integrating ground observation data, multi-source space-borne earth observation data and simulated data, the key sensitive factors of climate change in study areas, such as temperature, precipitation, vegetation cover, hazard, and risk information were extracted. The framework integrating catchment and coastal flood modelling (spatio-temporally dynamic), including sea level rise, to provide a holistic inundation model for future flooding was proposed. Major natural disaster risks in sensitive areas were mapped to reveal the correlation between the distribution of disasters and landform, drainage system and altitude, and the response mechanism of annual changes of major natural disasters to climate change.

The research results of the project can be be widely used to provide a quantitative basis for analysing the outcomes of implementation of the disaster mitigation strategies, providing valuable references for relevant researchers, engineers and technical personnel and users of relevant industries.