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

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.

Water-Wise Cities and Sustainable Water Systems: Concepts, Technologies, and Applications

“…Ainger C. and Fenner R. (2014) (Tang et al, 2017). While these events, and many others globally, cannot be entirely mitigated, there is an intrinsic vulnerability to flooding associated with living in urban areas which is further exacerbated by increasing urbanisation, and a changing climate (Miller & Hutchins, 2017;Rubinato et al, 2020).…”

Protecting Coastlines from Flooding in a Changing Climate: A Preliminary Experimental Study to Investigate a Sustainable Approach

“…However, they can all be considered ideal for the development of coral reefs and natural ecosystems that could replace the "green areas" simulated on this study, in line with the theory of incorporating natural habitats into hard solutions by permitting space for coastal adjustments. By implementing sea life and habitat restoration on the foreshore of beaches to combine with engineering options, a combined solution can be found where the ecosystem and engineering methods can act together to provide effective wave attenuation [93,94].…”

Assessing the Performance of LISFLOOD-FP and SWMM for a Small Watershed with Scarce Data Availability

“…In recent years, the number of floods occurring in urban environments has increased significantly [1,2]. Urban floods generally happen as a combination of meteorological and hydrological extremes, such as extreme rain events, and are characterized by highintensity flows combined with short response times, leading to severe losses [3,4].…”