Human–Environment Natural Disasters Interconnection in China: A Review

Rawshan Ali,Alban Kuriqi,Ozgur Kisi

doi:10.3390/cli8040048

Rawshan Ali, Alban Kuriqi + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/cli8040048

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Abstract

This study aimed to assess the interrelationship among extreme natural events and their impacts on environments and humans through a systematic and quantitative review based on the up-to-date scientific literature. Namely, the main goal was to add additional knowledge to the existing evidence of the impacts related to floods, droughts, and landslides on humans and the environment in China; this in order to identify knowledge gaps in research and practice to aid in improving the adaptation and mitigation measures against extreme natural events in China. In this study, 110 documents were analyzed in the evaluation of several impacts triggered by extreme events. Records were obtained from Scopus and Web of Science and examined with a text mining instrument to assess the pattern of publications over the years; the problems linked to extreme weather events were investigated, and the study gaps were discussed. This paper extends work by systematically reviewing recent evidence related to floods, droughts, and landslides in China. We listed the critical studies that focused on the impact of extreme events on both humans and the environment described in current reviews. The findings revealed that goods safety, social safety, and financial losses are of significant concern to the scientific community due to extreme natural events, which from our analysis resulted in being more frequent and intense. It is still underdeveloped to implement distant sensing and imaging methods to monitor and detect the impact of severe weather occurrences. There are still significant study gaps in the fields of the effects of extreme weather events. The analysis result shows that extreme events are increased during the time, so more in-depth investigation and efforts on adaptation, mitigation measures, and strategical governance plans are desperately required.

Highlights

IntroductionThe increasing frequency of extreme weather events (EWE) associated with climate change [3,4] is a severe threat to agriculture and living beings
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depicts an Extreme Weather Event [1]as unusual or less than the 10th or 90th percentile of an estimated likelihood density function [2].The increasing frequency of extreme weather events (EWE) associated with climate change [3,4] is a severe threat to agriculture and living beings
Many studies have focused on the extreme climate and its change in China and surrounding areas over the past decade, and here we provide a review of this topic The subjects covered extreme events, flooding, drought, and landslides [11,13,25,35,44,46,47,50,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59]

Summary

Introduction

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events (EWE) associated with climate change [3,4] is a severe threat to agriculture and living beings. The long-lasting socioeconomic costs of heatwaves, floods, wildfires, hailstorms, and other EWE pose significant threats to farmers and communities, especially considering future predictions of climate change (CC) intensity, frequency, and spatiotemporal scope [3,5,6]. Weather disasters in China are causing billions of Chinese Yuan of damage, and significant loss of life [7]. In various regions across China, droughts, floods, landslides, or other weather disasters caused death, destruction, and significant agricultural losses [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14].

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