Advances in Modelling and Prediction on the Impact of Human Activities and Extreme Events on Environments

Matteo Rubinato*, Min Luo, Xing Zheng, Jaan H. Pu, Songdong Shao

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalEditorialpeer-review

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1768
Number of pages9
JournalWater
Volume12
Early online date22 Jun 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2020

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Keywords

  • experimental modelling; numerical modelling; scouring; sediment transport; smoothed-particle hydrodynamics; flooding; dam-break; debris flows; climate change; urban evolution; natural hazard

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