Professor Kuishuang Feng's Team Publishes in Nature Cities
- GEOG HKU
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
Nature Cities: Stress-testing the cascading economic impacts of urban flooding across 306 Chinese cities
Professor Kuishuang Feng in collaboration with multiple domestic and international research teams, Quantified the Economic Impact of Urban Flooding in China and Revealing the Critical Threshold for Nonlinear Growth.
Flood risk, exacerbated by climate change, is one of the most widespread natural hazards affecting socioeconomic development, production activities, and resident safety. As cities develop along rivers and coastlines, their exposure and vulnerability increase with climate change, while spatial expansion further heightens human sensitivity to flooding.
By coupling flood hazard modeling with an extended multiregional input–output model, the study quantifies direct losses and tracks indirect propagation, distinguishing between local indirect losses within flooded cities and ripple losses in other regions. An overflow indicator is introduced to measure passive losses in non-flooded cities when floods occur elsewhere.
Losses exhibit a nonlinear rise with increasing severity: low-frequency, low-intensity events primarily cause direct capital losses, whereas rare, high-intensity events shift the impact toward local indirect losses. Spatial disparities are evident: wealthy cities incur larger absolute losses but experience lower GDP-relative impacts, while poorer cities face higher proportional losses, particularly in terms of labor. Ripple losses concentrate in major hub cities, amplifying systemic risks..
Links for full articles
Comments