To help Australia adapt to climate change and manage the disasters that come with it, the federal government this week pledged A$600 million towards establishing the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, and $210 million for the Australian Climate […]
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People living on the east coast of Australia have been experiencing a rare meteorological event. Record-breaking rainfall in some regions, and very heavy and sustained rainfall in others, has led to significant flooding. In different places, this has […]
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It has been well established that rising temperatures are increasing precipitation extremes. It is natural to hence assume that the risk of flooding will also increase. However, contrary to this popular belief most published literature finds more evidence […]
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Australia is facing more severe floods and droughts as rainfall patterns diminish over the past three decades, a new report has warned. Co-author Professor Will Steffen from the Climate Council said the report shows an intensification of drought and […]
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My PhD research looks into how we can provide earlier indications of flood hazard at the global scale. One way of doing this is through seasonal forecasts of high (or low) river flow. Seasonal forecasts are designed to […]
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Currently, flood risk management practitioners in Australia mostly use event-based models (simulating a single flood event in isolation) as opposed to continuous models (simulating runoff dynamically over time). However, there is a commonly held belief in the hydrology […]
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New data recording the past 1,500 years of flows in the Brisbane River have revealed that South-East Queensland’s climate – once assumed to be largely stable – is in fact highly variable. Until now, we have only had access to […]
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Australia is a continent defined by extremes, and recent decades have seen some extraordinary climate events. But droughts, floods, heatwaves, and fires have battered Australia for millennia. Are recent extreme events really worse than those in the past? […]
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Flood-related disasters take a significant number of human lives globally, besides causing substantial economic damage amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars per event. In low or middle-income countries, these disasters are largely due to underdeveloped flood warning […]
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Australia is a continent of extremes and has been inhabited by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Yet we know little about its past climate. Our new study uses tree rings, corals, ice cores and cave sediments from […]
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Most major floods in South East Queensland arrive in five-year bursts, once every 40 years or so, according to our new research. Yet flood estimation, protection and management approaches are still designed on the basis that flood risk stays the same […]
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In recent years, scientists have successfully identified the human fingerprint on hot years, heatwaves, and a range of other temperature extremes around the world. But as everyone knows, climate change affects more than just temperature. The “signal” of human-induced climate […]
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Tomorrow’s risk is being built today. We must therefore move away from risk assessments that show risk at a single point in the present and move instead towards risk assessments that can guide decision makers towards a resilient […]
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Research shows that the most common way people are killed during a flood is when they attempt to cross a bridge or flooded road. Photo: Dana Fairhead Fatalities from floods form a major proportion of natural hazard deaths […]
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