Newton Fund (Invitation Only). Disaster Resilient Cities: Forecasting local level climate extremes and physical hazards for Kuala Lumpar

Recent natural disasters in Malaysia, such as the wide-spread floods in 2014/15 and the flash flooding of Kuala Lumpur in 2007, have revealed that improvements are required in the prediction of damaging natural hazards and in the capacity to manage the associated risks and consequences.

Appropriate to the theme of 'future cities', the focus of this project is the prediction and management of physical risks relevant to Kuala Lumpur, which is the Malaysian capital and the most populated city in Malaysia with around 8 million inhabitants. The particular hazards to be targeted in this project, which are common in Kuala Lumpur, are floods, landslides, sinkholes, strong winds, urban heat and air pollution.

A consortium of 16 research and business partners from the UK and Malaysia has been assembled for this project. The basic strategy is to adapt and combine existing technologies to enhance hazard assessment and develop the ability to forecast, with main objective to develop a prototype multi-hazard information platform suitable for communicating risks to geophysical and atmospheric hazards. The primary beneficiaries will be risk managers and decision-makers in Malaysian local government and the insurance sector. The project objectives relate to the Malaysian Science to Action initiative, which has an aim of mobilising science for societal well-being.

The University of Cambridge (UoC) is the lead UK and academic partner in the project and its main role is to lead the meteorological forecasting package. The British Geological Survey will co-lead the Geophysical hazards phase of the project working specifically on the geophysical hazard modelling (landslides and sinkholes) and co-develop a platform for managing and communicating multi-hazard forecasts in a changing climate for Greater Kuala Lumpur city region.

Benefits of the project will include:

Improved information regarding the risks of occurrence of geophysical and atmospheric hazards, enabling Malaysian local authorities to make better contingency plans to mitigate the effects of geophysical and atmospheric hazards, which will provide economic benefits and improve the quality of life for Malaysian citizens.

Improved information about geophysical hazards will aid the further development of insurance services in Malaysia.

The multi-hazard platform developed for Greater Kuala Lumpur city region will have relevance to cities elsewhere in Malaysia and in the wider south-east Asian region. Where the commercial development of such systems, could benefit both the commercial sector and future urban management.

The project will have a wide range of economic, societal and academic impacts.

The main outcome will be a prototype for an operational source of information about multiple physical hazards that may threaten Greater Kuala Lumpur (flash-flood, flood, landslide, sinkholes, heat, air pollution). The immediate beneficiaries will be the contingency planners and decision makers for that major city who will be able to manage better the risks and impacts associated with those hazards. To ensure that such benefits can be realised, these stakeholders will be engaged with the project, through representation on the steering committee and through regular dialogues with the project participants. Through improved planning the economic and societal damage of these physical hazards will be reduced. The methodologies developed in the project (both scientific and in construction of a knowledge dissemination network) will be applicable to other cities in Malaysia and beyond, so these benefits will broaden geographically beyond the lifetime of the project. Expansion of the applications will stimulate commercial exploitation to the benefit of the companies that provide the underlying models, which will in turn underpin investment in further model development to improve accuracy and efficiency.

Improved detailed information about the nature and distribution of the risks associated with the physical hazards will impact the insurance industry by aiding national insurance programmes that are expected to develop in Malaysia over the next several years.

Improved planning will bring social benefits, through improvements in the response of emergency services and through actions to mitigate the severity of damaging physical events.

The deliverables from the project will benefit the research community in several sectors. Results from the multi-scale meteorological modelling component will provide examples and case studies relevant to atmospheric and climate science. Methodologies employed in the collation of data from the mapping and assessment of geophysical hazards will be useful for research in the earth sciences and environmental sciences. Information will be disseminated through publications and through presentations at national and international workshops and conferences.