Prof Steve Darby is involved in two new NERC research grants, worth a combined total of around £900k FEC, that have been awarded through a Newton Fund thematic programme on Hydrometeorological Hazards in SE Asia. Steve, along with Justin Sheffield and Craig Hutton, will be leading a team of UK and Vietnamese scientists on the first of these projects, entitled “Slow onset hazard interactions with enhanced drought and flood extremes in an at-risk mega-delta”. This project will tackle how agricultural resilience to climate extremes can be enhanced through the use of new modelling tools and aligned policy and governance in the Mekong delta.
The second project is led by Dr Ivan Haigh (Ocean and Earth Science) and deals with the issue of compound flooding in coastal Vietnam. Compound flooding – when high tides coincide with storm surges and periods of increased river discharge – can generate extreme floods in coastal environments (e.g. as with Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017), but are neglected entirely from current risk assessments. This project will assess the drivers of compound flooding in Vietnam and deliver new analyses of flood risk under climate change for the Mekong delta.