Newton Fund (Invitation Only): DISASTER RESILIENT CITIES: FORECASTING LOCAL LEVEL CLIMATE EXTREMES AND PHYSICAL HAZARDS FOR KUALA LUMPUR

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, that are common in Kuala Lumpur, are floods, landslides, sink holes, 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 forecasting ability, and the main objective is to develop a prototype multi-hazard information platform suitable for communicating risks. 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.

University College London is one of the main UK academic partners and contributes to WP2 on both the simulation urban flood risk and urban heat islands in Kuala Lumpur.
With relation to urban flood risk, UCL's role is to contribute to the determination of rainfall scenarios in the hazard assessment, and to propose and test approaches for loss estimation from the rainfall and urban flooding scenarios. This work will be carried out in close collaboration with JBA and Met Malaysia.

In the context of the urban heat island simulations, UCL will modify an existing software platform to account for the specifics of tropical climates and better characterise the effects of varying building materials on the heat absorption and heat storage of the built environment. The new version of the software will be used to assess the susceptibility to heat-related hazards of several pilot areas in Kuala Lumpur, selected to have different land use features and urban characteristics. This work will be carried out in collaboration with CERC and Met Malaysia, and will involve field investigations.

Benefits of the project will include improved information regarding the risks of occurrence of natural hazards that will enable Malaysian local authorities to make better contingency plans to mitigate the effects of such hazards. This will in turn provide economic benefits and improve the quality of life for Malaysian citizens. Improved information about geophysical and atmospheric hazards will also aid the development of insurance services.

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 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 stake-holders 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 and 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.

The UCL contribution to the project will develop better loss assessment tools for both urban flooding and heat induced urban hazards. These tools can be directly applied by the Malaysian partners to implement preparedness and mitigation measures so as to improve the resilience of studied areas in Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, the developed methodologies will allow a wider application to other parts of Malaysia or South East Asia. These tools will also provide insurance companies with better ways to assess these risks, promoting the development of new financial products for Malaysia.