Attribution of the risk of extreme flood events to climate change in the context of changing land use and cover: case study of the shire river basin flood of 2015
type: CreativeWork
description: The 2015 flood event in the Shire River basin was characterised by Malawi Government’s Department of Disaster Management (DoDMA) as the worst on record. It led to the damage in property worth millions of dollars with recovery still ongoing 3 years later. Over 150 fatalities were confirmed at the time with hundreds of others missing. The extent of the damage of the disaster was perhaps underlined by the swift adoption of the disaster management policy which was still in draft format then and the adoption of the climate change management policy a year later. In the aftermath of the disaster, as with most extreme weather events elsewhere around the world, questions were asked as to whether climate change might have had a hand in the occurrence of such an event and whether, going into a warmer climate, events of that nature of extremity will be the new normal. By using the risk-based event attribution methodology based on dedicated attribution experiments with a global climate model, and focusing on one of the sub-catchments of the Shire River basin, this study explored whether climate change from anthropogenic sources might have influenced the likelihood of such an event occurring. However, given the nature of hydrological events and the land use history of the basin, land use and cover change is another potential flood risk factor which, if overlooked, might affect conclusions with regards to the contribution of external factors to the risk of flooding. To account for both climate change and land use and land change, four sets of rainfallrunoff simulations were run using the Hydrologiska Byrans Vattenbalans-avdelning (HBV) hydrological model which has the ability to simulate the impact of land use and climate change on rainfall-runoff relationships. Each set was a combination of a climate scenario-either “factual” or “counter-factual”- and land use and cover change scenario-either factual (historical) or counterfactual (current). The climate scenarios were based on si…
abstract: The 2015 flood event in the Shire River basin was characterised by Malawi Government’s Department of Disaster Management (DoDMA) as the worst on record. It led to the damage in property worth millions of dollars with recovery still ongoing 3 years later. Over 150 fatalities were confirmed at the time with hundreds of others missing. The extent of the damage of the disaster was perhaps underlined by the swift adoption of the disaster management policy which was still in draft format then and the adoption of the climate change management policy a year later. In the aftermath of the disaster, as with most extreme weather events elsewhere around the world, questions were asked as to whether climate change might have had a hand in the occurrence of such an event and whether, going into a warmer climate, events of that nature of extremity will be the new normal. By using the risk-based event attribution methodology based on dedicated attribution experiments with a global climate model, and focusing on one of the sub-catchments of the Shire River basin, this study explored whether climate change from anthropogenic sources might have influenced the likelihood of such an event occurring. However, given the nature of hydrological events and the land use history of the basin, land use and cover change is another potential flood risk factor which, if overlooked, might affect conclusions with regards to the contribution of external factors to the risk of flooding. To account for both climate change and land use and land change, four sets of rainfallrunoff simulations were run using the Hydrologiska Byrans Vattenbalans-avdelning (HBV) hydrological model which has the ability to simulate the impact of land use and climate change on rainfall-runoff relationships. Each set was a combination of a climate scenario-either “factual” or “counter-factual”- and land use and cover change scenario-either factual (historical) or counterfactual (current). The climate scenarios were based on si…
author: Likoya, Emmanuel
keywords: Climate Change, Land Use and Cover Change, Extreme Event, Flood Risk, Factual, Counter-Factual
date published: 2019
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:22:58Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of Environmental and Geographical Science

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/11427/31607