The Implementation of Resilience Engineering to Deal with Climate Change Impact
Luo Ching-Ruey (Edward) *
Department of Civil Engineering, National Chi-Nan University, Taiwan.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Climate change is a very interesting subject, because it has been compelling us to review our thinking, our development concepts, practices, paradigms, models, and so on from the view of the environment. In such introspections, we may identify the mistakes, weaknesses and unintended consequences of our development concepts, practices; and we may try to overcome those mistakes and will be conscious to avoid such shortcomings in the future. Land and water resources degradation are the major problems in the world. Poor land use practices and improper management systems have played a significant role in causing high soil erosion rates, sediment transport, and loss of agricultural nutrients. This causes various effects on resource bases like deforestation, expansion of residential areas, and agricultural land. The watershed is also facing high erosion due to the effects of intense rainfall of the watershed which aggravates the land cover change of the watershed. This continuous change in land cover has influenced the water balance of the watershed by changing the magnitude and pattern of the components of stream flow between surface runoff and groundwater flow in increasing the extent of the water management problem. In this study, the assessments of resilience engineering and its function as a framework for the environmental issues, such as resilience and management of water and public infrastructure has been done. After risk assessment, we obtained five risk levels and their corresponding resilience levels. The two can be regarded as negatively correlated. And at the same time, four corresponding adaptions are also proposed according to the resilience levels.
Keywords: Hazard, resilience engineering, risk, vulnerability