AN ASSESSMENT OF POTENTIAL CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON FLOOD RISK IN CENTRAL VIETNAM

Abstract

Flood is a natural feature of the environment and is also one the most frequent hazardous natural disaster. The impacts of flood are highly devastating and usually causing economic depression and direct damages to the livelihood, properties, and lives of the people. In recent years, the extended flat territory along the long coastline with the tropical cyclone frequency is result of flood problem in the central region of Vietnam. In an attempt to deal with this adversity, this paper aims to manifest the feasibility of assessing flood simulations that corresponds to the impacts of climate change. The system was developed using the outputs of the Hadley Centre Coupled Model, version 3 (HadCM3) for A2 and B2 scenarios and a coupling of hydrological – hydrodynamic models. The results indicated that the weather will become hotter in the future with the increase of temperature between 0.4°C to 2.2°C and 0.19°C to 0.6°C under A2 and B2 scenarios, respectively. On the other hand, the annual rainfall will also increase between 3.3% to 14.5% and 3.6% to 6.8% under A2 and B2 scenarios, respectively. The results also demonstrated that potentially serious increases in runoff and water level under future climate change scenarios. The unanticipated consequences might play a large role in destruction of crops, transportation, water supply, and communities located in the Huong River Basin. Additionally, the outcomes of this study can be applied for the entire Huong River Basin in order to mitigate the flood problems in the future.