Floods and droughts have regularly made the news in 2022. And the scale of the crisis behind the headlines is glaring. Over the last two decades, floods and droughts – two of the climate crisis's most devastating consequences- have affected 3 billion people, with staggering costs of human suffering and economic loss.

Rising global temperatures increase the moisture the atmosphere can hold, resulting in storms and heavy rains, but paradoxically also more intense dry spells as more water evaporates from the land and global weather patterns change. These changes to the hydrological cycle can deliver stronger, longer droughts and floods and bring these hazards to parts of the globe that have not seen them in the past. It isn't easy to point to a region or country that will not face more challenges managing these extremes in the very near future.

Societies need to adapt, and governments must prioritize, accelerate, and scale up their response mechanisms. We have to look at floods and droughts not as independent events but as being inseparably linked, underscoring our collective efforts to build climate resilience and improve disaster risk management. The World Bank proposed the framework known as the EPIC response: E - enabling environment of policies, laws, agencies, strategic plans, and information;        P -  planning at all levels to prioritize risk mitigation and increase resilience; I - investing in watersheds and water resources infrastructure; and C - controlling the use of land and water resources to reduce exposure and vulnerability.

The ninth ICFM webinar will focus on the interconnections between climate change, flooding and droughts. This 90-minute event will include three presentations of experts in the webinar areas and provide for sharing experiences from different parts of the world.

Webinar Programme

Introduction

• Slobodan P. Simonovic
  ICFM Chairperson, Water Resources Specialist, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, Western University, Canada

Presentations

• Gordon McBean
  

  Climate Specialist, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography & Environment, Western University, Canada
  - Climate Change and Extreme Events

• Wu Huan
  

  Flood specialist, Professor, School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, China
  - Global to Local Flood Monitoring and Forecasting

• Karthikeyan Lanka
  

  Drought specialist, Professor, Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India
  - Impact of droughts on climate change and vegetation

Q & A session

 

Presentations can be accessed here:

• Slobodan P. Simonovic
• Gordon McBean
• Wu Huan
• Karthikeyan Lanka

 

Moderator: ZHANG Cheng, Chairperson of the Permanent ICFM Secretariat, IWHR

Host
International Conference on Flood Management (ICFM)
China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR)

Organizer
Permanent Secretariat of ICFM

Technical support
Medcon Conference Service Platform (MEDCON)