Xander Wang
Van-Thanh-Van Nguyen
Xiong Zhou
Mohammad Reza Najafi- 1Canadian Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation, University of Prince Edward Island, St. Peter’s Bay, PE, Canada
- 2School of Climate Change and Adaptation, University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PE, Canada
- 3Department of Civil Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
- 4School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
- 5Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Western University, London, ON, Canada
Editorial on the Research Topic
Building flood resilience under climate change
In many regions of the world, flooding is one of the most dangerous natural hazards and is ranked as the most catastrophic natural disaster in terms of both the total of casualties and the percentage of fatalities (Jonkman, 2005). Storm surges, high tides, heavy precipitations, and quick snowmelt are some of the main factors that can cause flooding. Billions of people who are in danger of flooding worldwide live in low- and middle-income nations (Rentschler et al., 2022). Furthermore, millions of people live in severe poverty and are directly in danger of flooding because of their economic disadvantages. Approximately one-third of global economic losses are attributed to the catastrophic effects of flood occurrences. Flood risk assessment is especially crucial since flood threats are broad, expensive, and disproportionately affect economically vulnerable people (Tascón-González et al., 2020). One of the most critical issues to be solved is how to make our societies more resilient to flooding in the face of climate change. To tackle this critical issue, a paradigm change from reactive crisis management to proactive evaluation and mitigation of flooding risk is necessary (Wenger, 2016).
Documenting the most recent advancements in flood resilience considering climate change is the aim of this Research Topic. We gathered five relevant articles for this Research Topic.
• The paper titled “The Stackelberg Game Model of Cross-Border River Flood Control” by Wang et al. uses cooperative governance among the nations in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin (LMRB) as an example. The paper demonstrates flood control in the upstream region has a larger impact on the downstream region. Flood control in the downstream region progressively grew and flood control in the upstream region gradually diminished with an increase in flood control compensation.
• The paper titled “Resilience to Unusual Flooding After 2021 Tropical Storms in Part of Mainland Southeast Asia” by Wattanachareekul et al. examines several publicly available satellite pictures from the Google Earth engine platform that were captured by Sentinel-1 C band GRD and Sentinel-2. The paper has demonstrated that the typical flow of water was hindered by the existence of man-made buildings, particularly highways. In addition, this study has emphasized and clarified the role of the rural community and the ecosystem’s ability to withstand extreme weather occurrences in the future.
• The paper titled “Analytical Advances in Homeowner Flood Risk Quantification Considering Insurance, Building Replacement Value, And Freeboard” by Rahim et al. evaluates the average annual loss (AAL) to determine the flood risk incurred by the homeowner versus the flood insurer for properties in the United States. Using Monte Carlo simulation, the AAL is estimated and partitioned at the individual home scale, considering insurance coverage and deductibles as well as the height of the ground floor above the ground. The study results revealed new perspectives about how flood insurance protects homeowners from flood risk.
• The paper titled “National Assessment of Extreme Sea-Level Driven Inundation Under Rising Sea Levels” by Paulik et al. presents the estimation of the Extreme Sea Level (ESL) heights for nine annual recurrence intervals (ARI) between 2 years and one thousand years and then converted those values into space-varying water surface grids to quantify New Zealand’s land area exposure to inundation from ESLs and Rising Sea Levels (RSLs). In the process, a composite topographical dataset consisting of Airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) and bias-corrected Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data was developed. Topographical data was modified to represent mitigation structures, and a scalable static model was executed to map land inundation areas for 0.1 m RSL increments.
• The paper titled “Freeboard Life-Cycle Benefit-Cost Analysis of a Rental Singlefamily Residence for Landlord, Tenant, and Insurer” by Gnan et al. presents a life-cycle benefit-cost analysis to maximize the choice of freeboard—an extra first-floor height over the base flood elevation (BFE) for a rental single-family home—for the landlord, tenant, and insurer, or the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The study offers useful data that landlords, tenants, and other decision-makers can use to support their decision-making, which improves investment and occupancy choices.
We hope that the readers will find this Research Topic interesting, and the published papers will stimulate further research to develop appropriate measures for improving flood resilience in the face of climate change.
Author contributions
XW: Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing. V-T-VN: Writing–review and editing. XZ: Writing–review and editing. MN: Writing–review and editing.
Funding
The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the authors for their contributions and all the reviewers for their valuable comments and feedback.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.
Publisher’s note
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References
Jonkman, S. N. (2005). Global perspectives on loss of human life caused by floods. Nat. hazards 34 (2), 151–175. doi:10.1007/s11069-004-8891-3
Rentschler, J., Salhab, M., and Jafino, B. A. (2022). Flood exposure and poverty in 188 countries. Nat. Commun. 13 (1), 3527. doi:10.1038/s41467-022-30727-4
Tascón-González, L., Ferrer-Julià, M., Ruiz, M., and García-Meléndez, E. (2020). Social vulnerability assessment for flood risk analysis. Water 12 (2), 558. doi:10.3390/w12020558
Keywords: climate change, flood risk analysis, flood modeling, flood resilience, flood adaptation
Citation: Wang X, Nguyen V-T-V, Zhou X and Najafi MR (2024) Editorial: Building flood resilience under climate change. Front. Environ. Sci. 12:1365749. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1365749
Received: 04 January 2024; Accepted: 11 January 2024;
Published: 18 January 2024.
Edited and reviewed by:
Hayley Jane Fowler, Newcastle University, United KingdomCopyright © 2024 Wang, Nguyen, Zhou and Najafi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Xander Wang, xxwang@upei.ca, xiuquan.wang@gmail.com