Flooding Hazards across Southern China and Prospective Sustainability Measures

Hai-Min Lyu, Ye-Shuang Xu, Wen-Chieh Cheng and Arul Arulrajah
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Hai-Min Lyu: State Key Laboratory of Ocean Engineering, School of Naval Architecture, Ocean, and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Ye-Shuang Xu: State Key Laboratory of Ocean Engineering, School of Naval Architecture, Ocean, and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Wen-Chieh Cheng: Institute of Tunnel and Underground Structure Engineering, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an 710055, China
Arul Arulrajah: Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 5, 1-18

Abstract: The Yangtze River Basin and Huaihe River Basin in Southern China experienced severe floods 1998 and 2016. The reasons for the flooding hazards include the following two factors: hazardous weather conditions and degradation of the hydrological environment due to anthropogenic activities. This review work investigated the weather conditions based on recorded data, which showed that both 1998 and 2016 were in El Nino periods. Human activities include the degradations of rivers and lakes and the effects caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam. In addition, the flooding in 2016 had a lower hazard scale than that in 1998 but resulted in larger economic losses than that of 1998. To mitigate urban waterlogging caused by flooding hazards, China proposed a new strategy named Spongy City (SPC) in 2014. SPC promotes sustainable city development so that a city has the resilience to adapt to climate change, to mitigate the impacts of waterlogging caused by extreme rainfall events. The countermeasures used to tackle the SPC construction-related problems, such as local inundation, water resource shortage, storm water usage, and water pollution control, are proposed for city management to improve the environment.

Keywords: flooding hazards; hazardous weather conditions; urban waterlogging; SPC; sustainable development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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