The Ben Franklin Bridge spans the Delaware River as it runs through Philadelphia. Penn State researchers studied two floods of the river, one in 2004 and one 2006, as a case study of if risk management continues to reduce natural disaster impacts. Paired with 44 other case studies in a global project, the researchers found that traditional risk management techniques are not enough to reduce the impacts from increasingly severe and frequent extreme weather events. Credit: benedek/iStock
Penn State engineers contribute to global study on managing extreme weather risks
August 11, 2022
By Ashley WennersHerron
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Risk management has traditionally helped reduce the impacts of floods and droughts across the world, but an international collaboration is now reporting that such tactics are less effective as extreme weather events continue to increase in severity and in number.
The team of more than 90 researchers published the conclusion on Aug. 4 in Nature, after analyzing risk management impacts for two different extreme weather events at the same location in 45 case studies. The paper was the subject of a news and views article also published in the journal.
The collaboration comprised researchers from the International Associate of Hydrological Sciences, including Alfonso Mejia, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, and Sanjib Sharma, assistant research professor in the Penn State Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. Sharma earned his doctorate in civil and environmental engineering from Penn State in 2019, under the mentorship of Mejia. The team was led by Heidi Kreibich, head of the flood risk and climate adaptation working group at the German Research Centre for Geosciences.
Mejia and Sharma contributed one of the case studies, in which they examined two floods in the Delaware River basin. The first took place in 2004, the second in 2006.
“In the second event, we saw that the size of the flood was larger, resulting in larger impacts,” Mejia said. “The current weather events are surpassing what we’ve seen in the past, which causes problems because so much of our planning for management, including prevention and emergency response, is based on what we’ve seen in past events. We’re entering a phase where we’re seeing disaster that are more severe — in part because of climate change — and solutions from the past are no longer able to meet the needs arising to manage more severe disasters.”
Of the 45 case studies, all of which had increased weather event severity, only two demonstrated reduced impact. The researchers determined that these two cases, paired flood events in Barcelona, Spain, and in the Danube catchment in Germany and Austria, had fewer impacts due to three common management changes: improved governance and institutional changes; high investments in structural and non-structural measures; and strongly improved early warning and emergency response systems.
The researchers end their paper by recommending investigation into more universal application of these success factors as a way of reducing impacts associated with climate change and to improve risk management success.
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