Identification of strategies for adaptation planning to extreme events under climate change

Global climate change has significant but uncertain impacts on hydrological regimes as well as flooding patterns of a watershed, which may probably result in the enlargement of flood-prone areas and the loss of life and property. It is desired to develop effective approaches to identify optimal strategies of flooding adaptation under changing climatic conditions. In this study, a mixed integer fuzzy interval-stochastic programming (MIFISP) method is proposed for the planning of flood-retention capacity in flood-prone areas of a watershed based on the existing methods of interval linear programming (ILP), two-stage programming (TSP) and fuzzy linear programming (FLP). The developed MIFISP model is then applied to a typical watershed in western Canada. The results indicate that MIFISP can be employed for quantitatively analyzing flood-retention capacity management policies in the flood plain that are associated with different levels of economic penalties when the promised policy targets are violated. It is also implied that the model is effective for the identification of adaptation strategies to various flood events under changing climatic conditions.