Adapting to and Reducing Risk of Future Extreme Rainfall on Urban Flooding
| Project Details | |
|---|---|
| Organisation(s) involved: | ReVAMP, The School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, Wits University and the Water Research Commission (WRC) |
| Project Objective/ Description: | The focus is to design a user-friendly climate-change guideline document for municipal decision makers. The project aims to address how climate events, specifically extreme rainfall events, will affect the municipality now and in the future, and how these events can be planned for to minimise negative impacts. A range of methods is used in developing these guidelines. An assessment of the current situation was undertaken to gauge which areas and sectors within the municipality are the most vulnerable to current and past storm and flood risk. Then, some of the most up to date regional climate models are coupled with hydrological runoff models to reveal where storm and flood risks will be highest in the future.
The project aims to make sure this information is usable for managers within Ekurhuleni municipality. This is made possible by working with managers to find out what challenges they are already facing and how they foresee the projected rainfall and runoff projections to affect their department and what the implications may be from a practical management and planning perspective. All of these aspects will be combined to design guidelines that are valuable and applicable to the local Ekurhuleni context. Hopefully, this project will provide a method, rather than a document template, that can be adopted by decision makers in other local municipalities to help improve management of the risks that currently arise with climate variability and those that may occur with future climate change. |
| Location: | Ekurhuleni Municipality, Gauteng, South Africa |
| Contact: | Christina Fatti, tina.fatti@gmail.com |