Journal articles on the topic 'Understanding the impact of natural hazards caused by climate change'

Purpose The extraction of natural resources has long been part of economic development in small islands. The damage to environment and health is extensive, even rendering once productive islands virtually uninhabitable. Rather than providing long-term benefits to the population or to the environment, the culture of “extractivism” – a nonreciprocal approach where resources are removed and used with little care or regard to consequences – has instead left many in far more fragile circumstances, increasingly dependent on external income. The purpose of this paper is to show how continued extractivism in small islands is contributing to global climate change and increasing climate risks to the local communities. Design/methodology/approach Through a series of case studies, this paper examines the history of extractivism in small islands in Oceania, its contribution to environmental degradation locally and its impacts on health. Findings It examines how extractivism continues today, with local impacts on environment, health and wellbeing and its much more far-reaching consequences for global climate change and human health. At the same time, these island countries have heightened sensitivity to climate change due to their isolation, poverty and already variable climate, whereas the damage to natural resources, the disruption, economic dependence and adverse health impacts caused by extractivism impart reduced resilience to the new climate hazards in those communities. Practical implications This paper proposes alternatives to resource extractivism with options for climate compatible development in small islands that are health-promoting and build community resilience in the face of increasing threats from climate change. Originality/value Extractivism is a new concept that has not previously been applied to understanding health implications of resource exploitation thorough the conduit of climate change. Small-island countries are simultaneously exposed to widespread extractivism, including of materials contributing to global climate change, and are among the most vulnerable to the hazards that climate change brings.

For the Philippines, a country exposed to multiple natural hazards, such as severe winds, sustainable development includes resiliency. A severe wind hazard is raised by tropical cyclones in the Western Pacific, known as typhoons, which frequent the Philippines. Therefore, adequately evaluating wind hazards and their impact is crucial for sustainable building design. Acknowledging the effects of climate change on said hazards requires adaptation to their consequences, which necessitates a deeper understanding of the changing behavior of typhoons in recent years. For this study, detailed wind information from the Japanese Meteorological Agency from 1977 to 2021, the Holland-B parameter, and the radius of maximum wind speed for each typhoon, are determined for simulation of the regional cyclonic wind field. The analysis of the Holland-B parameters, which represent the steepness of the pressure gradient and tropical cyclone convection, suggests that the Holland-B parameters have been increasing since 2011. The evaluation of the maximum regional wind fields and the return period wind fields caused by typhoons also indicate an increasing trend in severe wind hazards. Seasonality for the location of severe wind hazards is also observed, with Visayas and Mindanao experiencing an increase (decrease) during the Northeast (Southwest) Monsoon season and Luzon experiencing an increase (decrease) during the Southwest (Northeast) Monsoon season.

Natural hazards such as floods and droughts occur frequently in southwestern China and have occurred more frequently in recent years, which has caused and will continue to cause serious damage to ecosystems and human lives and property. A full knowledge of the probability of hydro climatic variables is essential for the prevention and mitigation of natural hazards in return. Based on historical archives, atlases and other documented data, a sequence of graded drought and flood disasters covering the period 1250–2000 in Wuzhou City, southwest China, was reconstructed. Then, a correlation coefficient (−0.79, p < 0.01) was established between the sequence of grades and the measured annual precipitation from 1961 to 2000; using this correlation and the sequence of grades from 1250 to 2000, the annual precipitation record (from 1250 to 2000) was reconstructed and extended. Finally, we compared the reconstructed annual precipitation to the measured values from 1961–2000 to evaluate the efficacy of this method. The results show that the reconstructed precipitation sequence is credible, with a high correlation coefficient (0.84, p < 0.01) and a low relative bias (−1.95%). The reconstructed results indicate that the annual precipitation in Wuzhou City increased continuously during the 13–15th century and the 18–19th century and decreased during the 16–17th century and the 20th century. These results are expected to be useful for the prevention of flood and drought impacts and for understanding climate change.

Canada’s vast regions are reacting to climate change in uncertain ways. Understanding of local disaster risks and knowledge of underlying causes for negative impacts of disasters are critical factors to working toward a resilient environment across the social, economic, and the built sectors. Historically, floods have caused more economical and social damage around the world than other types of natural hazards. Since the 1900s, the most frequent hazards in Canada have been floods, wildfire, drought, and extreme cold, in terms of economic damage. The recent flood events in the Canadian provinces of Ontario, New Brunswick, Quebec, Alberta, and Manitoba have raised compelling concerns. These include should communities be educated with useful knowledge on hazard risk and resilience so they would be interested in the discussion on the vital role they can play in building resilience in their communities. Increasing awareness that perceived risk can be very different from the real threat is the motivation behind this study. The main objectives of this study include identifying and quantifying the gap between people’s perception of exposure and susceptibility to the risk and a lack of coping capacity and objective assessment of risk and resilience, as well as estimating an integrated measure of disaster resilience in a community. The proposed method has been applied to floods as an example, using actual data on the geomorphology of the study area, including terrain and low lying regions. It is hoped that the study will encourage a broader debate if a unified strategy for disaster resilience would be feasible and beneficial in Canada.

Abstract. Despite the strong societal impact of natural hazards, their documentation remains incomplete, with only a few inventories exceeding the past two centuries. Surprisingly enough, this also applies to Europe, a densely populated territory, and to floods, which along with storms are the most common and damage-causing natural hazard in Europe. In addition, existing inventories have often been compiled by scientists and technicians and are used for risk management in a top-down manner, although the participation of all parties concerned has been recognized as a key factor for disaster reduction. To address this double paradox, the present article presents the regional flood risk observatory ORRION for the Alsatian region, north-eastern France, and its very rich data content. Stemming from two successive interdisciplinary and transnational French–German research projects, ORRION was designed as a participative online platform on which information is shared between individuals, stakeholders, engineers, and scientists. This original approach aims at maximizing knowledge capitalization and contributes to building a common knowledge base for flood risk. ORRION is organized by events including all river floods that have likely arisen from a single synoptic situation. For each event, it documents information sources, date of occurrence, causes, and consequences in terms of damage and affected river basins and municipalities. ORRION has contributed toward renewing our knowledge of flood hazard and risk in the target area. Notably, here, long chronicles of floods are derived for 13 rivers, the Rhine and most of its main Alsatian tributaries and for all Alsatian municipalities, most of them since the end of the 15th century but over more than one millennium for the Rhine. Their main characteristics according to various typologies (seasonality, causes, severity, etc.) are analysed. Major developments over the study period related to sources, land use, and/or climate change are identified. The advantages and limitations of the approach are discussed, and the potential to expand both data exploitation and build common flood risk knowledge is outlined.

A transdisciplinary dialogue and innovative research, including technical and artistic research as well as digital humanities are necessary to solve complex issues. We need to support and produce creative practices, and engage in a critical reflection about the social and ethical dimensions of our current technology developments. At the core is an understanding that no single discipline, technology, or field can produce knowledge capable of addressing the complexities and crises of the contemporary world. Moreover, we see the arts and humanities as critical tools for understanding this hyper-complex, mediated, and fragmented global reality. As a use case, we will consider the complexity of extreme weather events, natural disasters and failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, which are the risks with the highest likelihood of occurrence and largest global impact (World Economic Forum, 2017). Through our project, World of Wild Waters (WoWW), we are using immersive narratives and gamification to create a simpler holistic understanding of cause and effect of natural hazards by creating immersive user experiences based on real data, realistic scenarios and simulations. The objective is to increase societal preparedness for a multitude of stakeholders. Quality of Experience (QoE) modeling and assessment of immersive media experiences are at the heart of the expected impact of the narratives, where we would expect active participation, engagement and change, to play a key role [1]. Here, we present our views of immersion and presence in light of Quality of Experience (QoE). We will discuss the technical and creative considerations needed for QoE modeling and assessment of immersive media experiences. Finally, we will provide some reflections on QoE being an important building block in immersive narratives in general, and especially towards considering Extended Realities (XR) as an instantiation of Digital storytelling.

Globally there is an increase in the social and economic impacts of all natural hazards, and especially those that are generated by weather systems. Climate change is a part of this process, but it is most likely that long-term climate change will first become evident as an increase in natural disasters, especially flooding and drought. However, a major cause of increasing natural disasters is the growth and relocation of population, concentrating into complex urban settlements that proliferate infrastructure and property in vulnerable floodplains and the coastal fringe. While Australia has experienced a decline in the loss of life from natural hazards, the loss to business, agriculture and the economy in general has increased exponentially. Weather generated natural disasters dominate the total disaster bill. Vulnerability to natural hazards may be reduced through hazard education and effective warnings. The communication of weather information is inevitably a top down process. Understanding of information and in particular, warnings about hazardous events involves a public safety transfer of knowledge from highly specialised scientists through emergency managers, local politicians and the media, to every member of society. Research shows that selection, interpretation and expression of information and warnings occurs at institutional and societal levels. Both the media and the general public select, re-interpret, and weigh up information about weather and hazards, applying a complex set of attitudes, perceptions, experience and misinformation to the initial message. An understanding of how people interpret the message is essential to the accuracy and safety of warnings and forecasts. Examples and case studies from post-disaster and behavioural research carried out by the Centre for Disaster Studies, and hazard events illustrate the issues of understanding the message. 1

Abstract. A natural hazard is a naturally occurring extreme event that has a negative effect on people and society or the environment. Natural hazards may have severe implications for human life and can potentially generate economic losses and damage ecosystems. A better understanding of their major causes, probability of occurrence, and consequences enables society to be better prepared to save human lives as well as to invest in adaptation options. Natural hazards related to climate change are identified as one of the Grand Challenges in the Baltic Sea region. Here, we summarize existing knowledge about extreme events in the Baltic Sea region with a focus on the past 200 years as well as on future climate scenarios. The events considered here are the major hydro-meteorological events in the region and include wind storms, extreme waves, high and low sea levels, ice ridging, heavy precipitation, sea-effect snowfall, river floods, heat waves, ice seasons, and drought. We also address some ecological extremes and the implications of extreme events for society (phytoplankton blooms, forest fires, coastal flooding, offshore infrastructure, and shipping). Significant knowledge gaps are identified, including the response of large-scale atmospheric circulation to climate change and also concerning specific events, for example, the occurrence of marine heat waves and small-scale variability in precipitation. Suggestions for future research include the further development of high-resolution Earth system models and the potential use of methodologies for data analysis (statistical methods and machine learning). With respect to the expected impacts of climate change, changes are expected for sea level, extreme precipitation, heat waves and phytoplankton blooms (increase), and cold spells and severe ice winters (decrease). For some extremes (drying, river flooding, and extreme waves), the change depends on the area and time period studied.

Climate extremes threaten human health, economic stability, and the well-being of natural and built environments (e.g., 2003 European heat wave). As the world continues to warm, climate hazards are expected to increase in frequency and intensity. The impacts of extreme events will also be more severe due to the increased exposure (growing population and development) and vulnerability (aging infrastructure) of human settlements. Climate models attribute part of the projected increases in the intensity and frequency of natural disasters to anthropogenic emissions and changes in land use and land cover. Here, we review the impacts, historical and projected changes,and theoretical research gaps of key extreme events (heat waves, droughts, wildfires, precipitation, and flooding). We also highlight the need to improve our understanding of the dependence between individual and interrelated climate extremes because anthropogenic-induced warming increases the risk of not only individual climate extremes but also compound (co-occurring) and cascading hazards. ▪ Climate hazards are expected to increase in frequency and intensity in a warming world. ▪ Anthropogenic-induced warming increases the risk of compound and cascading hazards. ▪ We need to improve our understanding of causes and drivers of compound and cascading hazards.

Natural hazards are processes that serve as triggers for natural disasters. Natural hazards can be classified into six categories. Geophysical or geological hazards relate to movement in solid earth. Their examples include earthquakes and volcanic activity. Hydrological hazards relate to the movement of water and include floods, landslides, and wave action. Meteorological hazards are storms, extreme temperatures, and fog. Climatological hazards are increasingly related to climate change and include droughts and wildfires. Biological hazards are caused by exposure to living organisms and/or their toxic substances. The COVID-19 virus is an example of a biological hazard. Extraterrestrial hazards are caused by asteroids, meteoroids, and comets as they pass near earth or strike earth. In addition to local damage, they can change earth inter planetary conditions that can affect the Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere. This entry presents an overview of origins, impacts, and management of natural disasters. It describes processes that have potential to cause natural disasters. It outlines a brief history of impacts of natural hazards on the human built environment and the common techniques adopted for natural disaster preparedness. It also lays out challenges in dealing with disasters caused by natural hazards and points to new directions in warding off the adverse impact of such disasters.

Climate change induced sea-level rise (SLR) is on its increase globally. Regionally the lowlands of China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and islands of the Malaysian, Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos are among the world’s most threatened regions. Sea-level rise has major impacts on the ecosystems and society. It threatens coastal populations, economic activities, and fragile ecosystems as mangroves, coastal salt-marches and wetlands. This paper provides a summary of the current state of knowledge of sea level-rise and its effects on both human and natural ecosystems. The focus is on coastal urban areas and low lying deltas in South-East Asia and Vietnam, as one of the most threatened areas in the world. About 3 mm per year reflects the growing consensus on the average SLR worldwide. The trend speeds up during recent decades. The figures are subject to local, temporal and methodological variation. In Vietnam the average values of 3.3 mm per year during the 1993-2014 period are above the worldwide average. Although a basic conceptual understanding exists that the increasing global frequency of the strongest tropical cyclones is related with the increasing temperature and SLR, this relationship is insufficiently understood. Moreover the precise, complex environmental, economic, social, and health impacts are currently unclear. SLR, storms and changing precipitation patterns increase flood risks, in particular in urban areas. Part of the current scientific debate is on how urban agglomeration can be made more resilient to flood risks. Where originally mainly technical interventions dominated this discussion, it becomes increasingly clear that proactive special planning, flood defense, flood risk mitigation, flood preparation, and flood recovery are important, but costly instruments. 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Abstract The Albanian part of the Lake Ohrid area is endangered by several natural hazards like: floods, landslides, rock falls, erosion and wild fires. Those events have caused environmental, social and economical damages, so it’s important to study the factors that had caused them, their costs and the measures that should be taken to prevent, or to reduce their impact. Most of those events have been triggered by climate change, increasing of human pressure on land and unplanned urban development. Rapid urbanization of latest years has imposed people to build their homes or other activities on unsafe places. Climate change is another factor that has influenced in floods and droughts. The presence of the mountainous relief in the Western part combined with damage of vegetation cover, plays an important role in generating landslides and erosion of land. Natural hazards map of this area, created with GIS, shows where are distributed and which are the zones that can be caught by one of those events. Through this map the habitants of this area and local authorities, will know the risks and take necessary measures to prevent those events. Objectives of this study are to determine the risked areas and measures to minimize damages in life losing, economy and environment.

Central America is a region susceptible to natural disasters and climate change. We reviewed the literature on the main atmospheric and oceanographic forces and climate modulators affecting Central America, for different spatial and time scales. We also reviewed the reported correlation between climate variability, natural hazards and climate change aspects (in the past and future). In addition, we examined the current state of seasonal prediction systems being applied to the region. At inter-annual scales, El Niño/Southern Oscillation is the main climate modulator; however, other indices such as the Tropical North Atlantic, Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation, have shown a correlation with precipitation anomalies in the region. Current seasonal forecast systems in the region have shown a constant development, including incorporation of different approaches ranging from statistical to dynamical downscaling, improving prediction of variables such as precipitation. Many studies have revealed the need of including –in addition to the climatic information– socio-economic variables to assess the impact of natural disasters and climate change in the region. These studies highlight the importance of socio-economic and human life losses associated with the impacts caused by natural hazards for organizations and governments. Rev. Biol. Trop. 66(Suppl. 1): S153-S175. Epub 2018 April 01.

AbstractIn this study five intermediate cities of Bangladesh as future populated urban centers have been investigated to formulate a comprehensive framework for climate resilient urban governance The conceptual framework adopted the modified structure of CRF model of S Tyler and M Moench (2012) incorporating Urban functional system, Local urban governance, and Climate resilience as major components. The cities have been conceptualized as a functional system to identify the climate change impact upon social, economic, environmental and political subsystems. The vulnerability assessment of climate change impact shows that the different level of risks caused by frequent climate hazards. The research initiates a resilience building process based on Mehta’s good governance (1998) through a shared learning dialogue (SLD) among stakeholders.

This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Introduction The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene Global warming All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997. In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12. Melting of continental glaciers As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario. Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario Sea level rise As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario. Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995. Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021) Apocalyptic genre in recent writing As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion. Conclusion Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene. When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. Hence, this chapter, as part of the book itself, aims to contribute to studies of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies. References David P.G. Bondand Stephen E. Grasby. "Late Ordovician mass extinction caused by volcanism, warming, and anoxia, not cooling and glaciation: REPLY." Geology 48, no. 8 (Geological Society of America2020): 510. Cyril Langlois.’Vestiges de l'apocalypse: ‘le site de Tanis, Dakota du Nord 2019’. Accessed June, 6, 2021, https://planet-terre.ens-lyon.fr/pdf/Tanis-extinction-K-Pg.pdf NajouaGharsalli,ElhoucineEssefi, Rana Baydoun, and ChokriYaich. ‘The Anthropocene and Great Acceleration as controversial epoch of human-induced activities: case study of the Halk El Menjel wetland, eastern Tunisia’. Applied Ecology and Environmental Research 18(3) (Corvinus University of Budapest 2020): 4137-4166 Elhoucine Essefi, ‘On the Geochemistry and Mineralogy of the Anthropocene’. International Journal of Water and Wastewater Treatment, 6(2). 1-14, (Sci Forschen2020): doi.org/10.16966/2381-5299.168 Elhoucine Essefi. ‘Record of the Anthropocene-Great Acceleration along a core from the coast of Sfax, southeastern Tunisia’. Turkish journal of earth science, (TÜBİTAK,2021). 1-16. Chiara Xausa. ‘Climate Fiction and the Crisis of Imagination: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book’. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 8(2), (WARWICK 2021): 99-119. Akyol, Özlem. "Climate Change: An Apocalypse for Urban Space? An Ecocritical Reading of “Venice Drowned” and “The Tamarisk Hunter”." Folklor/Edebiyat 26, no. 101 (UluslararasıKıbrısÜniversitesi 2020): 115-126. Boswell, Suzanne F. "The Four Tourists of the Apocalypse: Figures of the Anthropocene in Caribbean Climate Fiction.". Paradoxa 31, (Academia 2020): 359-378. Ayt Ougougdal, Houssam, Mohamed YacoubiKhebiza, Mohammed Messouli, and Asia Lachir. 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Fast urbanization and industrialization have progressively caused severe impacts on mountainous, river, and coastal environments, and have increased the risks for people living in these areas. Human activities have changed ecosystems hence it is important to determine ways to predict these consequences to enable the preservation and restoration of these key areas. Furthermore, extreme events attributed to climate change are becoming more frequent, aggravating the entire scenario and introducing ulterior uncertainties on the accurate and efficient management of these areas to protect the environment as well as the health and safety of people. In actual fact, climate change is altering rain patterns and causing extreme heat, as well as inducing other weather mutations. All these lead to more frequent natural disasters such as flood events, erosions, and the contamination and spreading of pollutants. Therefore, efforts need to be devoted to investigate the underlying causes, and to identify feasible mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce negative impacts on both the environment and citizens. To contribute towards this aim, the selected papers in this Special Issue covered a wide range of issues that are mainly relevant to: (i) the numerical and experimental characterization of complex flow conditions under specific circumstances induced by the natural hazards; (ii) the effect of climate change on the hydrological processes in mountainous, river, and coastal environments, (iii) the protection of ecosystems and the restoration of areas damaged by the effects of climate change and human activities.

Home to 60 percent of the world's population, Asia accounts for 85 percent of those killed and affected globally by disaster events in 2011. Using an integrated sociological framework comprised of the pressure and release (PAR) model and the double-risk society hypothesis, and drawing on data obtained from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), PreventionWeb, and the IPCC special report on extreme events, this article offers a sociological understanding of disaster development and recovery in Asia. The particular focus is on seven Asian countries, namely, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Rather than treating disasters entirely as “natural” events caused by “violent forces of nature”, we emphasize various ways in which social systems create disaster vulnerability. We argue that existing disaster mitigation and adaptation strategies in Asia that focus almost entirely on the natural and technological aspects of hazards have serious limitations, as they ignore the root causes of disaster vulnerabilities, such as limited access to power and resources. This article therefore recommends a holistic approach to disaster management and mitigation that takes into consideration the various larger social, political, and economic conditions and contexts.

Nowadays, erosion and flooding risks represent a serious threat to coastal areas and this trend will be worsened due to climate change. The increasing concentration of population in coastal areas has a negative impact on the coastal ecosystem due to change in land use and the exploitation of natural resources, which has also increased exposure to coastal hazards. Risk assessment is hence a primary topic in coastal areas and are often affected by mismanagement and competition of interest between stakeholders. This paper presents an integrated model for coastal risk assessment as well as its application on a test site in the Puglia Region (Southern Italy). An innovative approach has been developed combining a traditional index-based model, exploiting a Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response framework (DPSIR), with stakeholder’s and policy makers’ engagement by using the Future Workshop method and complementary individual working sessions structured through the use of Fuzzy-Cognitive Maps. The study shows that stakeholders’ and policy makers’ risk perception play a key role in coastal risk management and that the integration of physical risk with social perception is relevant to develop more effective management following the basics of Integrated Coastal Zone Management.

Abstract Extreme event attribution aims to elucidate the link between global climate change, extreme weather events, and the harms experienced on the ground by people, property, and nature. It therefore allows the disentangling of different drivers of extreme weather from human-induced climate change and hence provides valuable information to adapt to climate change and to assess loss and damage. However, providing such assessments systematically is currently out of reach. This is due to limitations in attribution science, including the capacity for studying different types of events, as well as the geographical heterogeneity of both climate and impact data availability. Here, we review current knowledge of the influences of climate change on five different extreme weather hazards (extreme temperatures, heavy rainfall, drought, wildfire, tropical cyclones), the impacts of recent extreme weather events of each type, and thus the degree to which various impacts are attributable to climate change. For instance, heat extremes have increased in likelihood and intensity worldwide due to climate change, with tens of thousands of deaths directly attributable. This is likely a significant underestimate due to the limited availability of impact information in lower- and middle-income countries. Meanwhile, tropical cyclone rainfall and storm surge height have increased for individual events and across all basins. In the North Atlantic basin, climate change amplified the rainfall of events that, combined, caused half a trillion USD in damages. At the same time, severe droughts in many parts of the world are not attributable to climate change. To advance our understanding of present-day extreme weather impacts due to climate change developments on several levels are required. These include improving the recording of extreme weather impacts around the world, improving the coverage of attribution studies across different events and regions, and using attribution studies to explore the contributions of both climate and non-climate drivers of impacts.

IPCC AR5 reported that the extreme events like tropical cyclone, heavy rainfall and so on will be strengthen. The winter cyclone is one of the cause of coastal hazard. The winter cyclone is defined as the extratropical depression with rapid development. It causes high wave and storm surge from winter to spring, and Japan sometimes have casualties and economical loss. Some researches reported that the number of winter cyclone tend to increase. Because its tendency seems to go on, future change estimation of winter cyclone activity is important for disaster reduction. Understanding of winter cyclone is developing. For example, Yoshida and Asuma showed that the winter cyclones are classified by their track and the development of winter cyclone is related to lateral heat flux. On the other hand, almost of all researches of impact assessment on coastal hazard focus on the tropical cyclone. Mori et al. showed the maximum potential storm surge in Japan using maximum potential intensity of tropical cyclone and GCM outputs, and large storm surge will increase. Shimura et al. showed that extreme wave caused by the tropical cyclone will develop at offshore region of east from Japan. This research aims to reveal stochastic future change of winter cyclone using the database for policy decision making for future climate change (after here, d4PDF) which is huge ensemble dataset of present- and futureclimate. Then, the risk of coastal hazard will be evaluate.

The present work raises the importance of land use planning for the global climate change adaptation in coastal municipalities, in particular against the effects caused by natural hazards associated with climate change. The first part presents the current situation of the main land use planning instruments in the coastal municipalities of Mexico, in the second part the current environmental situation in said municipalities is presented, identifying the degree of their transformation, the alteration of the ecosystems in the context of watersheds, the impact on the drainage network and mangrove losses. Under these circumstances, and taking into account that the future climate scenarios indicate an increase in the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones, most of the coastal municipalities are in a situation of very high to medium vulnerability. The third part of the text presents the concrete action that coastal municipalities can take to be more resilient in the face of the challenges posed by global climate change. These actions can be grouped into four major thematic groups: Implementation of an early warning system based on a municipal information system, conserving the first defense barrier (dunes, mangroves and coastal lagoons) against cyclones and storm tides, decrease the vulnerability of infrastructure, productive systems and population, and restoration and conservation of ecosystems with a productive approach to lessen the impact of extreme events.

Coastal region of Bangladesh possesses a fragile ecosystem and is exposed to hazards like cyclones, floods, storm surges, and water-logging. A detail understanding on the impact of water-logging due to various natural, man-made and climate change scenarios is still lacking. Considering this research gap, the present research is aimed to study impacts of these scenarios inside polders-24 and 25 which are situated on the western part of the coastal region. In this Study as natural scenario, sedimentation in the Hari River; as man-made scenario, new polders in the south-central region and as SLR scenario, an extreme sea level rise of 1.48m are considered. Long-term satellite images are analyzed, and numerical model is applied in the study area. The result shows that water-logging is more acute inside polder-25 compared to polder-24. Sedimentation in Hari River aggravates the water-logging condition. Dredging in Hari River does improve the situation. Journal of Engineering Science 12(3), 2021, 73-83

Among the most prevalent natural hazards, flooding has been threatening human lives and properties. Robust flood simulation is required for effective response and prevention. Machine learning is widely used in flood modeling due to its high performance and scalability. Nonetheless, data pre-processing of heterogeneous sources can be cumbersome, and traditional data processing and modeling have been limited to a single resolution. This study employed an Icosahedral Snyder Equal Area Aperture 3 Hexagonal Discrete Global Grid System (ISEA3H DGGS) as a scalable, standard spatial framework for computation, integration, and analysis of multi-source geospatial data. We managed to incorporate external machine learning algorithms with a DGGS-based data framework, and project future flood risks under multiple climate change scenarios for southern New Brunswick, Canada. A total of 32 explanatory factors including topographical, hydrological, geomorphic, meteorological, and anthropogenic were investigated. Results showed that low elevation and proximity to permanent waterbodies were primary factors of flooding events, and rising spring temperatures can increase flood risk. Flooding extent was predicted to occupy 135–203% of the 2019 flood area, one of the most recent major flooding events, by the year 2100. Our results assisted in understanding the potential impact of climate change on flood risk, and indicated the feasibility of DGGS as the standard data fabric for heterogeneous data integration and incorporated in multi-scale data mining.

Given that mankind has occasionally been exposed to the devastation of catastrophic proportions throughout its history (extreme weather events, natural dis-asters, bioterrorism, and pandemics are having an increased global impact), which are increasing in the 20th century due to climate change, the risk reduction measures are being taken at the global level to reduce the severity of the consequences. Natural and technological disasters in the European countries have caused significant loss of life and damage to structures and infrastructure, which has led to the ratification of conventions at the world level in the field of disaster preparedness (Hyogo Framework for Action and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Management). Hospitals and other healthcare facilities are amongst those most jeopardized. The paper gives an overview of the methodology in the field of defining the resilience of healthcare facilities through determining the hospital safety index. Through the application of this and other methodologies in a case study conducted in Serbia, the paper examines the direct correlations between hospital safety index and climate change. Paper gives the results of hospital safety index calculation considering modules 2-4 and possibilities for the potential use of the module 1 (research on hazards) in separate evaluation.

In 2006 UNESCO report has identified soil loss as one of the main threats of climate change with possible impact to natural and cultural heritage. The study illustrated in this paper shows the results from geomatic perspective, applying an interdisciplinary approach undertaken in order to identify major natural hazards affecting cultural landscapes and archaeological heritage in rural areas in Cyprus. In particular, Earth Observation (EO) and ground-based methods were identified and applied for mapping, monitoring and estimation of the possible soil loss caused by soil erosion. Special attention was given to the land use/land cover factor (C) and its impact on the overall estimation of the soil-loss. Cover factor represents the effect of soil-disturbing activities, plants, crop sequence and productivity level, soil cover and subsurface bio-mass on soil erosion. Urban areas have a definite role in retarding the recharge process, leading to increased runoff and soil loss in the broader area. On the other hand, natural vegetation plays a predominant role in reducing water erosion. The land use change was estimated based on the difference of the NDVI value between Landsat 5 TM and Sentinel-2 data for the period between 1980s’ until today. Cover factor was then estimated for both periods and significant land use changes were further examined in areas of significant cultural and natural landscape value. The results were then compared in order to study the impact of land use change on the soil erosion and hence on the soil loss rate in the selected areas.

Low elevation coastal zones (LECZ) are extensive throughout the southeastern United States. LECZ communities are threatened by inundation from sea level rise, storm surge, wetland degradation, land subsidence, and hydrological flooding. Communication among scientists, stakeholders, policy makers and minority and poor residents must improve. We must predict processes spanning the ecological, physical, social, and health sciences. Communities need to address linkages of (1) human and socioeconomic vulnerabilities; (2) public health and safety; (3) economic concerns; (4) land loss; (5) wetland threats; and (6) coastal inundation. Essential capabilities must include a network to assemble and distribute data and model code to assess risk and its causes, support adaptive management, and improve the resiliency of communities. Better communication of information and understanding among residents and officials is essential. Here we review recent background literature on these matters and offer recommendations for integrating natural and social sciences. We advocate for a cyber-network of scientists, modelers, engineers, educators, and stakeholders from academia, federal state and local agencies, non-governmental organizations, residents, and the private sector. Our vision is to enhance future resilience of LECZ communities by offering approaches to mitigate hazards to human health, safety and welfare and reduce impacts to coastal residents and industries.

The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a blueprint for global peace and prosperity, while conserving natural ecosystems and resources for the planet. However, factors such as climate-induced weather extremes and other High-Impact Low-Probability (HILP) events on their own can devastate lives and livelihoods. When a pandemic affects us, as COVID-19 has, any concurrent hazards interacting with it highlight additional challenges to disaster and emergency management worldwide. Such amplified effects contribute to greater societal and environmental risks, with cross-cutting impacts and exposing inequities. Hence, understanding how a pandemic affects the management of concurrent hazards and HILP is vital in disaster risk reduction practice. This study reviews the contemporary literature and utilizes data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) to unpack how multiple extreme events have interacted with the coronavirus pandemic and affected the progress in achieving the SDGs. This study is especially urgent, given the multidimensional societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic amidst climate change. Results indicate that mainstreaming risk management into development planning can mitigate the adverse effects of disasters. Successes in addressing compound risks have helped us understand the value of new technologies, such as the use of drones and robots to limit human exposure. Enhancing data collection efforts to enable inclusive sentinel systems can improve surveillance and effective response to future risk challenges. Stay-at-home policies put in place during the pandemic for virus containment have highlighted the need to holistically consider the built environment and socio-economic exigencies when addressing the pandemic’s physical and mental health impacts, and could also aid in the context of increasing climate-induced extreme events. As we have seen, such policies, services, and technologies, along with good nutrition, can significantly help safeguard health and well-being in pandemic times, especially when simultaneously faced with ubiquitous climate-induced extreme events. In the final decade of SDG actions, these measures may help in efforts to “Leave No One Behind”, enhance human–environment relations, and propel society to embrace sustainable policies and lifestyles that facilitate building back better in a post-pandemic world. Concerted actions that directly target the compounding effects of different interacting hazards should be a critical priority of the Sendai Framework by 2030.

Permafrost plays a hugely significant role in sustaining the global climate for many reasons. As it thaws, gases (usually methane and carbon dioxide) that have lain trapped underneath the ice for millennia are released. These gases then enter the atmosphere and accelerate global warming which leads to more permafrost degradation and it eventually becomes a problem which exacerbates itself. In recent times, the warming and thawing of the surface layer of the permafrost region in northeastern Eurasia has caused serious impacts on the living environment of local residents. In many ways, the thawing of permafrost can be seen as a new natural disaster and, as such, it requires understanding from local populations to put measures in place to mitigate the effects. Associate Professor Yoshihiro Iijima is part of a international team of researchers investigating the effects of climate change on the permafrost regions of Russia and Mongolia. The findings could help local populations introduce conservation activities to their societies

Abstract. In the past few decades, various natural hazards have occurred in Laos. To lower the consequences and losses caused by hazardous events, it is important to understand the magnitude of each hazard and the potential impact area. The main objective of this study was to propose a new approach to integrating hazard maps to detect hazardous areas on a national scale, for which area-limited data are available. The integrated hazard maps were based on a merging of five hazard maps: floods, land use changes, landslides, climate change impacts on floods, and climate change impacts on landslides. The integrated hazard map consists of six maps under three representative concentration pathway (RCP) scenarios and two time periods (near future and far future). The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) was used as a tool to combine the different hazard maps into an integrated hazard map. From the results, comparing the increase in the very high hazard area between the integrated hazard maps of the far future under the RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 scenarios, Khammouan Province has the highest increase (16.45 %). Additionally, the very high hazard area in Khammouan Province increased by approximately 12.47 % between the integrated hazard maps under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios of the far future. The integrated hazard maps can pinpoint the dangerous area through the whole country, and the map can be used as primary data for selected future development areas. There are some limitations of the AHP methodology, which supposes linear independence of alternatives and criteria.

Mangrove forests play an important role in mitigating climate change but are threatened by aquaculture expansion. The inclusion of mangroves in climate change mitigation strategies requires measuring of carbon stocks and the emissions caused by land use change over time. This study provides a synthesis of carbon stocks in mangrove and shrimp ponds in the Gulf of Guayaquil. In this study area, we identified 134,064 ha of mangrove forest and 153,950 ha of shrimp farms. Two mangrove strata were identified according to their height and basal area: medium-statured mangrove (lower height and basal area) and tall mangrove (greater height and basal area). These strata showed statistical differences in aboveground carbon stocks. In both strata, the most abundant mangrove species was Rhizophora mangle. For both strata, trees had a maximum height (>30 m), and their density was greater than 827 ha−1. Total ecosystem level carbon stocks (measured to 1 m soil depth) were 320.9 Mg C ha−1 in medium-statured mangroves and 419.4 Mg C ha−1 in tall mangroves. The differences are attributable to higher basal area, soil organic carbon concentrations and salinity, tidal range, origin of allochthonous material, and herbivory patterns. Mangrove soils represented >80% of the total ecosystem carbon. Ecosystem carbon stocks were lower (81.9 Mg C ha−1) in the shrimp farms, 50% less than in undisturbed mangroves. Our results highlight mangroves as tropical ecosystems with extremely high carbon storage; therefore, they play an important role in mitigating climate change. This research provides a better understanding of how carbon stocks in this gulf are found and can be used for design strategies to protect global natural carbon sinks.

The adaptive capacity of coastal disasters caused by climate change in order to strengthen southwestern Taiwan against natural calamities in the future is investigated in this paper. In Taiwan, the coastal zone suffers from approximately four typhoons each year, and the exceptionally high sea levels caused by storm surges frequently results in coastal disasters and hinders the development of the coastal area. The problems of rising sea levels and frequent typhoons induced by climate change have threatened the Taiwanese coastal environments. These influences as well as serious land subsidence upon a scenario year were carried out in the coastal areas near the cities of Chiayi and Tainan in Taiwan. The present study focuses on the construction of the disaster characteristics on Chiayi and Tainan Coasts, model establishment for situation analysis of water environmental factors, impact estimation and indefinite analysis on disasters, and vulnerability and risk estimation of coastal disasters. An understanding of the marine and meteorological characteristics in coastal zones is conducive to raising the efficiency of the defense against coastal disasters. These results could provide useful information to establish strategies to implement as well as how to analyze the benefits of such a program.

Foredunes provide habitat and natural protection in coastal areas. The dune formation and development are controlled by aeolian, marine, and ecological processes (Hesp, 2002; Houser, 2009). The dune height is a key parameter for determining storm impact on barrier islands (Sallenger, 2000) and for calculating the Coastal Resilience Index (Dong et al., 2018). Therefore, the understanding of the relative role of both aeolian and marine processes on controlling dune evolution are fundamental for coastal hazards assessment on the context of climate change. A previous study (Cohn et al., 2018) conducted on a meso-tidal beach suggested that extreme water level can contribute to dune growth. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the role of aeolian and marine processes on the dune growth at a low-energy sea-breeze dominated micro-tidal beach located in northern Yucatan peninsula by means of high-resolution beach surveys.Recorded Presentation from the vICCE (YouTube Link): https://youtu.be/6f7pM01_jho

The multi-hazard risk assessment of urban areas represents a comprehensive approach that can be used to reduce, manage and overcome the risks arising from the combination of different natural hazards. This paper presents a methodology for multi-hazard risk assessment based on Spatial Multi-Criteria Decision Making. The PROMETHEE method was used to assess multi-hazard risks caused by seismic, flood and extreme sea waves impact. The methodology is applied for multi-hazard risk evaluation of the urban area of Kaštel Kambelovac, located on the Croatian coast of the Adriatic Sea. The settlement is placed in a zone of high seismic risk with a large number of old stone historical buildings which are vulnerable to the earthquakes. Being located along the low-lying coast, this area is also threatened by floods due to climate change-induced sea level rises. Furthermore, the settlement is exposed to flooding caused by extreme sea waves generated by severe wind. In the present contribution, the multi-hazard risk is assessed for different scenarios and different levels, based on exposure and vulnerability for each of the natural hazards and the influence of additional criteria to the overall risk in homogenous zones. Single-risk analysis has shown that the seismic risk is dominant for the whole pilot area. The results of multi-hazard assessment have shown that in all combinations the highest risk is present in the historical part of Kaštel Kambelovac. This is because the historical part is most exposed to sea floods and extreme waves, as well as due to the fact that a significant number of historical buildings is located in this area.

The land sector is expected to contribute to strategies aimed at mitigating global temperature increases and this necessitates an improved understanding of human actions on land sector emissions and removals. Current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change guidelines for the land sector of national greenhouse gas inventories are based on the assumption that all emissions and removals in managed lands are caused by humans. In Canada, however, natural disturbances in managed forests can result in large and highly variable emissions and subsequent removals that mask the impacts of management activities. Here we describe methods to isolate and quantify the impacts of management on trends in estimated anthropogenic emissions and removals in Canada’s managed forest by partitioning fluxes from two land components: fluxes from lands dominated by natural disturbance effects and fluxes from the remaining managed forests. The sum of the flux estimates of the two land components is equal to net emissions and removals in managed forest lands. Separating highly variable natural disturbance fluxes from the remaining fluxes in managed forest lands increases the understanding of how human activities impact flux trends. Comparing these anthropogenic emissions and removals with those from natural disturbances quantifies their relative contributions to global atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

There is evidence that the toll of death and destruction caused by natural hazards is rising. This is often ascribed to the impact of climate change that resulted in an increased frequency of extreme meteorological events. As a consequence, it is realistic to expect that the casualties and damages caused by floods will increase in the near future. Advanced weather forecast is a fundamental tool to predict the occurrence of floods and structural mitigation measures are crucial for flood protection. However, these strategies should be associate with tools to promote and increase natural-disaster awareness and nonstructural mitigation measures in the exposed population. To bridge this gap, we coupled innovative, ICT-based technologies with crowdsourcing. The idea is to exploit geospatial data gathered by citizens and volunteers with their own devices such as mobile phones to provide authorities with relevant information in case of flood emergencies. This paper describes the design and testing of an Android application named MAppERS (Mobile Applications for Emergency Response and Support), thought to enhance active participation and response of the population in territorial and flood-risk mitigation in Frederikssund, Denmark. The results of the piloting fully validate MAppERS as an effective tool to support the decision-making process during a crisis and to improve the awareness of the community and their disaster resilience.

Dust storms present numerous hazards to human society and are particularly significant to people living in the Dust Belt which stretches from the Sahara across the Middle East to northeast Asia. This paper presents a review of dust storm variability and trends in frequency on decadal timescales from three Dust Belt settlements with long-term (>50 years) meteorological records: Nouakchott, Mauritania; Zabol, Iran, and Minqin, China. The inhabitants of each of these settlements have experienced a decline in dust storms in recent decades, since the late 1980s at Nouakchott, since 2004 at Zabol, and since the late 1970s at Minqin. The roles of climatic variables and human activities are assessed in each case, as drivers of periods of high dust storm frequency and subsequent declines in dust emissions. Both climatic and human variables have been important but overall the balance of research conclusions indicates natural processes (precipitation totals, wind strength) have had greater impact than human action, in the latter case both in the form of mismanagement (abandoned farmland, water management schemes) and attempts to reduce wind erosion (afforestation projects). Understanding the drivers of change in dust storm dynamics at the local scale is increasingly important for efforts to mitigate dust storm hazards as climate change projections suggest that the global dryland area is likely to expand in the twenty-first century, along with an associated increase in the risk of drought and dust emissions.

Recently, there have been many abnormal natural phenomena caused by climate change. Anthropogenic factors associated with insufficient water resource management can be another cause. Among natural causes, rainfall intensity and volume often induce flooding. Therefore, accurate rainfall estimation and prediction can prevent and mitigate damage caused by these hazards. Sadly, uncertainties often hinder accurate rainfall forecasting. This study investigates the uncertainty of the Korean rainfall ensemble prediction data and runoff analysis model in order to enhance reliability and improve prediction. The objectives of this study include: (i) evaluating the spatial characteristics and applicability of limited area ensemble prediction system (LENS) data; (ii) understanding uncertainty using parameter correction and generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) and grid-based rainfall-runoff model (GRM); (iii) evaluating models before and after LENS-GRM correction. In this study, data from the Wicheon Basin was used. The informal likelihood (R2, NSE, PBIAS) and formal likelihood (log-normal) were used to evaluate model applicability. The results confirmed that uncertainty of the behavioral model exists using the likelihood threshold when applying the runoff model to rainfall forecasting data. Accordingly, this method is expected to enable more reliable flood prediction by reducing the uncertainties of the rainfall ensemble data and the runoff model when selecting the behavioral model for the user’s uncertainty analysis. It also provides a basis for flood prediction studies that apply rainfall and geographical characteristics for rainfall-runoff uncertainty analysis.

Globally, hydrometeorological hazards have large impacts to agriculture output, as well as human well-being. With climate change derived increasing frequency of extreme weather conditions, the situation has becoming more severe. This study strives to evaluate both dry and wet conditions in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD), also known as the rice basket of the Southeast Asian region. Different meteorological parameters from the last three decades were used to develop drought indices for Ca Mau province to investigate their impact on agricultural output. For this purpose, the standard precipitation index (SPI), the agricultural rainfall index (ARI), and the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) were used in this study. Results highlight that Ca Mau has a peculiar characteristic of the whole VMD in that dry periods persist well into the wet season extending the duration of drought events. The role of storms, including tropical storms, and El Niño cannot be ignored as extreme events, which both change humidity, as well as rainfall. It is also found that the drought situation has caused significant damage to both rice and shrimp outputs in almost 6000 hectares. The assessment contributes to an improved understanding of the pattern of unpredictable rainfall and meteorological anomaly conditions in Ca Mau. The findings of this paper are important for both policymakers and practitioners in designing more robust plans for water resource management.

Climate change and anthropogenic activities are widely considered the main factors affecting vegetation growth. However, their relative contributions are under debate. Within the non-climatic impact, detailed human activities, particularly government policy adjustments, are less investigated. In this study, we develop a fractional vegetation coverage (FVC) extraction method based on MODIS-EVI satellite data to analyze the spatiotemporal variation of vegetation and its attributions in the China–Mongolia–Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC). The average FVC has improved, with a general increase of 0.02/10a from 2000 to 2020. We construct a driving factor identification system for FVC change, based on partial and multiple correlation coefficients, and we divide the driving forces of FVC changes into seven climate-driven types and one non-climate-driven type. The results reveal that FVC changes caused by climatic factors account for 28.2% of CMREC. The most prominent greening (19.5%) is precipitation-driven, and is extensively distributed in Khentii Aimag, Mongolia; southeast Inner Mongolia; west Jilin Province; and southwest Heilongjiang Province, China. Moreover, we quantify the relative contribution of climatic and non-climatic factors to significant FVC change using the first-difference multivariate regression method. The results indicate that the effects of non-climatic factors on vegetation change outweigh those of climatic factors in most areas. According to the land cover change and regional policy adjustment, anthropogenic activities such as afforestation, reclamation, and planting structure adjustment explain most vegetation improvement in the Northeast Plain; eastern Inner Mongolia; and the Hetao Irrigation District, China. Meanwhile, both vegetation improvement and degradation disperse concurrently in the Mongolian and Russian parts of CMREC, where climate change and anthropogenic activities positively and negatively affect vegetation change, respectively. Despite the greening in most CMREC, it must be noted that human-induced greening is unsustainable to some degree. The overdevelopment of black soil area and sandy land, adverse effects of afforestation projects, and natural hazards related to weather and climate extremes altogether threaten the local ecological security in the long run. Therefore, governments should develop new desertification countermeasures in accordance with the laws of nature, and enhance international cooperation to guarantee the ecological safety of CMREC.

Climate change is considered a major threat to society and nature. UV irradiation is the most important environmental genotoxic agent. Thus, how elevated UV irradiation may influence human health and ecosystems has generated wide concern in the scientific community, as well as with policy makers and the public in general. In this study, we investigated patterns and mechanisms of UV adaptation in natural ecosystems by studying a gene-specific variation in the potato late blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestans. We compared the sequence characteristics of radiation sensitive 23 (RAD23), a gene involved in the nucleotide excision repair (NER) pathway and UV tolerance, in P. infestans isolates sampled from various altitudes. We found that lower genetic variation in the RAD23 gene was caused by natural selection. The hypothesis that UV irradiation drives this selection was supported by strong correlations between the genomic characteristics and altitudinal origin (historic UV irradiation) of the RAD23 sequences with UV tolerance of the P. infestans isolates. These results indicate that the RAD23 gene plays an important role in the adaptation of P. infestans to UV stress. We also found that different climatic factors could work synergistically to determine the evolutionary adaptation of species, making the influence of climate change on ecological functions and resilience more difficult to predict. Future attention should aim at understanding the collective impact generated by simultaneous change in several climate factors on species adaptation and ecological sustainability, using state of the art technologies such as experimental evolution, genome-wide scanning, and proteomics.

Abstract. Flood events are the most frequent cause of damage to infrastructure compared to any other natural hazard, and global changes (climate, socioeconomic, technological) are likely to increase this damage. Transportation infrastructure systems are responsible for moving people, goods and services, and ensuring connection within and among urban areas. A failed link in these systems can impact the community by threatening evacuation capability, recovery operations and the overall economy. Bridges are critical links in the wider urban system since they are associated with little redundancy and a high (re)construction cost. Riverine bridges are particularly prone to failure during flood events; in fact, the risks to bridges from high river flows and erosion have been recognized as crucial at global level. The interaction of flow, structure and network is complex, and not fully understood. This study aims to establish a rigorous, multiphysics modeling approach for the assessment of the hydrodynamic forces impacting inundated bridges, and the subsequent structural response, while understanding the consequences of such impact on the surrounding network. The objectives of this study are to model hydrodynamic forces as demand on the bridge structure, to advance a performance evaluation of the structure under the modeled loading, and to assess the overall impact at systemic level. The flood-prone city of Carlisle (UK) is used as a case study and a proof of concept. Implications of the hydrodynamic impact on the performance and functionality of the surrounding transport network are discussed. This research will help to fill the gap between current guidance for design and assessment of bridges within the overall transport system.

The natural environment of crops is exposed to a complex collection of biotic and abiotic pressures. Abiotic stresses cover a diversity of environmental elements that cannot be avoided, such as temperature, drought, salinity, cold, heat, light, and water stress. Biotic stress is caused by living organisms with which plants coexist and interact. Pathogens and herbivores are examples of biotic stressors that can threaten food security and result in significant economic losses. Agricultural production systems differ in the extent of stress towards cultivated crops; agroforestry is considered to provide a protective function against environmental stress. The concept of this review was to assess the impact of environmental change and the atmospheric variability on the plants in agroforestry systems. The application of trees in field crop production has become more and more involved in practice, especially in areas with an extreme climate and unfavorable soil conditions. The main reasons for the rising interest are the effects of climate change, soil degradation, and erosion. Most of the trees are used as hedgerows or farm boundaries, or as scattered planting on the farm to control soil erosion as well as to improve farm productivity, which requires a thorough understanding of each stress element.

Background Vegetation dynamics is defined as a significant indictor in regulating terrestrial carbon balance and climate change, and this issue is important for the evaluation of climate change. Though much work has been done concerning the correlations among vegetation dynamics, precipitation and temperature, the related questions about relationships between vegetation dynamics and other climatic factors (e.g., specific humidity, net radiation, soil moisture) have not been thoroughly considered. Understanding these questions is of primary importance in developing policies to address climate change. Methods In this study, the least squares regression analysis method was used to simulate the trend of vegetation dynamics based on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from 1981 to 2018. A partial correlation analysis method was used to explore the relationship between vegetation dynamics and climate change; and further,the revised greyscale model was applied to predict the future growth trend of natural vegetation. Results The Mann-Kendall test results showed that th e air temperature rose sharply in 1997 and had been in a state of high fluctuations since then. Strong changes in hydrothermal conditions had major impact on vegetation dynamics in the area. Specifically, the NDVI value of natural vegetation showed an increasing trend from 1981 to 2018, and the same changes occurred in the precipitation. From 1981 to 1997, the values of natural vegetation increased at a rate of 0.0016 per year. From 1999 to 2009, the NDVI value decreased by an average rate of 0.0025 per year. From 2010 to 2018, the values began an increasing trend and reached a peak in 2017, with an average annual rate of 0.0033. The high vegetation dynamics areas were mainly concentrated in the north and south slopes of the Tianshan Mountains, the Ili River Valley and the Altay area. The greyscale prediction results showed that the annual average NDVI values of natural vegetation may present a fluctuating increasing trend. The NDVI value in 2030 is 0.0196 higher than that in 2018, with an increase of 6.18%. Conclusions Our results indicate that: (i) the variations of climatic factors have caused a huge change in the hydrothermal conditions in Xinjiang; (ii) the vegetation dynamics in Xinjiang showed obvious volatility, and then in the end stage of the study were higher than the initial stage the vegetation dynamics in Xinjiang showed a staged increasing trend; (iii) the vegetation dynamics were affected by many factors,of which precipitation was the main reason; (iv) in the next decade, the vegetation dynamics in Xinjiang will show an increasing trend.

Abstract Nature-based Solution (NBS) is an umbrella for ecosystem-based approaches to prevent or mitigate the impacts of hydro-meteorological hazards. The increasing hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence such as floods in Bandung City because of both climate change phenomenon and rapid growth of Bandung City has caused a big impact on people live in slums and high-density settlement. Realizing this risk, Bandung City has implemented strategies to reduce flood risk, including the Sustainable Urban Drainage System (SUDS) as stated on the Bandung City Spatial Plan (RTRW) 2011-2031. However, this measure had not effectively reduced flood risk in Bandung City. Therefore, this research focuses to analyse the implementation of SUDS and how it can capture the concept of NBS, with the study case Cibadak Administrative Village, one of the poor and high-density urban settlements in Bandung City. The result was developed using a mixed method consisting of a descriptive quantitative approach, spatial analysis for satellite imagery, and content analysis technique to analyse each challenge of SUDS implementation. The result indicates the lack of capacity in scale, budget, natural characteristic, and social demographic for SUDS implementation in poor and high-density urban settlement in Bandung, which aligns with the challenge of NBS implementation in the global south.

Bangladesh is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. In particular, its riverine dwellers face continuous riverbank erosion, frequent flooding, and other adverse effects of climate change which makes the life of people more vulnerable. In order to assess adaptive capacity, understanding of how different households comprehend climate change is crucial. This paper aims to measure the determinants of adaptive capacityto understand the vulnerability risk among the riverbank erosion affected households. An integrated model was proposed with the constructs derived from Awareness-Ability-Action (AAA) and Socioeconomic-Sociopolitical and Institutional-Socioecological (SSS) model. A structured questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 300 participants who were affected by natural disaster specifically river erosion. The proposed research model was tested using the partial least-squares (PLS) method, a statistical analysis technique based upon structural equation modeling (SEM).The results show that the loss of farming land and all levels of riparian households impacted severely by riverbank erosion and forced into a low livelihood status, strong adaptive capacity would reduce vulnerability risk in the affected areas, community-level vulnerability measurement enhances communities understandings, build capacity, make aware, and allow them to identify appropriate locally adaptation strategies, and local level adaptation strategies may reduce the impact of such hazards on all sorts of vulnerability risk among rural households. The nature of this study may restrict its generalizability to other research settings. Future research may be necessary to validate the findings by applying this model in the vulnerability context in other developing countries. This research method and results would generate new insights with respect to planning the sustainable development goal and provide a reference for decision-making.

Abstract. As a consequence of change in global climate, an increased frequency of natural hazards such as storm surges, tsunamis and cyclones, is predicted to have dramatic affects on the coastal communities and ecosystems by virtue of the devastation they cause during and after their occurrence. The tsunami of December 2004 and the Thane cyclone of 2011 caused extensive human and economic losses along the coastline of Puducherry and Tamil Nadu. The devastation caused by these events highlighted the need for vulnerability assessment to ensure better understanding of the elements causing different hazards and to consequently minimize the after- effects of the future events. This paper demonstrates an analytical hierarchical process (AHP)-based approach to coastal vulnerability studies as an improvement to the existing methodologies for vulnerability assessment. The paper also encourages the inclusion of socio-economic parameters along with the physical parameters to calculate the coastal vulnerability index using AHP-derived weights. Seven physical–geological parameters (slope, geomorphology, elevation, shoreline change, sea level rise, significant wave height and tidal range) and four socio-economic factors (population, land use/land cover (LU/LC), roads and location of tourist areas) are considered to measure the physical vulnerability index (PVI) as well as the socio-economic vulnerability index (SVI) of the Puducherry coast. Based on the weights and scores derived using AHP, vulnerability maps are prepared to demarcate areas with very low, medium and high vulnerability. A combination of PVI and SVI values are further utilized to compute the coastal vulnerability index (CVI). Finally, the various coastal segments are grouped into the 3 vulnerability classes to obtain the coastal vulnerability map. The entire coastal extent between Muthiapet and Kirumampakkam as well as the northern part of Kalapet is designated as the high vulnerability zone, which constitutes 50% of the coastline. The region between the southern coastal extent of Kalapet and Lawspet is the medium vulnerability zone and the remaining 25% is the low vulnerability zone. The results obtained enable the identification and prioritization of the more vulnerable areas of the region in order to further assist the government and the residing coastal communities in better coastal management and conservation.

Abstract. Increased frequency of natural hazards such as storm surge, tsunami and cyclone, as a consequence of change in global climate, is predicted to have dramatic effects on the coastal communities and ecosystems by virtue of the devastation they cause during and after their occurrence. The tsunami of December 2004 and the Thane cyclone of 2011 caused extensive human and economic losses along the coastline of Puducherry and Tamil Nadu. The devastation caused by these events highlighted the need for vulnerability assessment to ensure better understanding of the elements causing different hazards and to consequently minimize the after-effects of the future events. This paper advocates an Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) based approach to coastal vulnerability studies as an improvement to the existing methodologies for vulnerability assessment. The paper also encourages the inclusion of socio-economic parameters along with the physical parameters to calculate the coastal vulnerability index using AHP derived weights. Seven physical-geological parameters (slope, geomorphology, elevation, shoreline change, sea level rise, significant wave height and tidal range) and four socio-economic factors (population, Land-use/Land-cover (LU/LC), roads and location of tourist places) are considered to measure the Physical Vulnerability Index (PVI) as well as the Socio-economic Vulnerability Index (SVI) of the Puducherry coast. Based on the weights and scores derived using AHP, vulnerability maps are prepared to demarcate areas with very low, medium and high vulnerability. A combination of PVI and SVI values are further utilized to compute the Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI). Finally, the various coastal segments are grouped into the 3 vulnerability classes to obtain the final coastal vulnerability map. The entire coastal extent between Muthiapet and Kirumampakkam as well as the northern part of Kalapet is designated as the high vulnerability zone which constitutes 50% of the coastline. The region between the southern coastal extent of Kalapet and Lawspet is the medium vulnerability zone and the rest 25% is the low vulnerability zone. The results obtained, enable to identify and prioritize the more vulnerable areas of the region to further assist the government and the residing coastal communities in better coastal management and conservation.

Abstract. Economic losses caused by hydrological extremes – floods and droughts – have been on the rise. Hydrological extremes jeopardize human security and impact on societal livelihood and welfare. Security can be generally understood as freedom from threat and the ability of societies to maintain their independent identity and their functional integrity against forces of change. Several dimensions of security are reviewed in the context of hydrological extremes. The traditional interpretation of security, focused on the state military capabilities, has been replaced by a wider understanding, including economic, societal and environmental aspects that get increasing attention. Floods and droughts pose a burden and serious challenges to the state that is responsible for sustaining economic development, and societal and environmental security. The latter can be regarded as the maintenance of ecosystem services, on which a society depends. An important part of it is water security, which can be defined as the availability of an adequate quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods, ecosystems and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks to people, environments and economies. Security concerns arise because, over large areas, hydrological extremes − floods and droughts − are becoming more frequent and more severe. In terms of dealing with water-related risks, climate change can increase uncertainties, which makes the state’s task to deliver security more difficult and more expensive. However, changes in population size and development, and level of protection, drive exposure to hydrological hazards.

The impact of climate change caused by global warming is currently one of the trending topics in various media and it is an extremely serious threat to human security. Forest fires, floods, landslides and changes in lifestyles to survive natural disasters are the very significant contributing factors to poverty rates in various parts of the world. The London School of Economics and Political Science conducted a study of 141 countries affected by disasters in the 1981-2002 period and found a close link between natural disasters and women's socioeconomic status. Data from the National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB) states that women have 14 times of risk for becoming victims of disasters compared to adult men. Women become the most victimized because women prioritize children and their families rather than saving themselves. Although women bear more risks to climate change, women can also have the principal opportunity and role in implementing climate change mitigation adaptation, namely by making women actors in disaster mitigation and drivers of change in parallel to their strong responsibilities to their families. By providing adequate knowledge for women about adaptation and mitigation of disasters, the women can turn themselves to be the strategic activists in coping with disasters for communities living in disaster-prone areas.This study is a comparative discussion of three research results to obtain an overview and find solutions to women's problems from the consequences of climate change, which is a study by changing women from being the most victims of natural disasters to becoming the driving actor for families and communities in overcoming disaster and her ability to survive the post-disaster situation. The conclusion is the three levels of gender roles related to climate change to increase women's adaptive capacity. An adaptation strategy needs the form of 1. Increasing the role of women in the political arena. It is a crucial issue because women's rights can be protected by their presence and role, as well as women in guarding policies. 2. Increasing the role of women in the realm of education. Education is no less important than politics because education will provide a foundation for understanding and self-confidence, bargaining and personal branding for women so that their presence in society will be recognized and will no longer be discriminated. 3. Cultural reconstruction based on gender equality is very important because so far, the notion of patriarchy is still inherent in our culture. Many perspectives are cooptated on the statement that superior (men) are stronger then give rise women mythos that is said to be weak (women). In reality, the presence of women is still fundamental to the aspect of maintaining the economy and education for the continuation and the quality of the life in the society.

Chagas disease, caused by the protozoa Trypanosoma cruzi, is an important yet neglected disease that represents a severe public health problem in the Americas. Although the alteration of natural habitats and climate change can favor the establishment of new transmission cycles for T. cruzi, the compound effect of human-modified landscapes and current climate change on the transmission dynamics of T. cruzi has until now received little attention. A better understanding of the relationship between these factors and T. cruzi presence is an important step towards finding ways to mitigate the future impact of this disease on human communities. Here, we assess how wild and domestic cycles of T. cruzi transmission are related to human-modified landscapes and climate conditions (LUCC-CC). Using a Bayesian datamining framework, we measured the correlations among the presence of T. cruzi transmission cycles (sylvatic, rural, and urban) and historical land use, land cover, and climate for the period 1985 to 2012. We then estimated the potential range changes of T. cruzi transmission cycles under future land-use and -cover change and climate change scenarios for 2050 and 2070 time-horizons, with respect to “green” (RCP 2.6), “business-as-usual” (RCP 4.5), and “worst-case” (RCP 8.5) scenarios, and four general circulation models. Our results show how sylvatic and domestic transmission cycles could have historically interacted through the potential exchange of wild triatomines (insect vectors of T. cruzi) and mammals carrying T. cruzi, due to the proximity of human settlements (urban and rural) to natural habitats. However, T. cruzi transmission cycles in recent times (i.e., 2011) have undergone a domiciliation process where several triatomines have colonized and adapted to human dwellings and domestic species (e.g., dogs and cats) that can be the main blood sources for these triatomines. Accordingly, Chagas disease could become an emerging health problem in urban areas. Projecting potential future range shifts of T. cruzi transmission cycles under LUCC-CC scenarios we found for RCP 2.6 no expansion of favourable conditions for the presence of T. cruzi transmission cycles. However, for RCP 4.5 and 8.5, a significant range expansion of T. cruzi could be expected. We conclude that if sustainable goals are reached by appropriate changes in socio-economic and development policies we can expect no increase in suitable habitats for T. cruzi transmission cycles.