Climate change impacts on mountain landscapes and infrastructure: the case of High Mountain Asia
Event Type: Seminar
Date: 23 August 2022, 13:00 to 14:00
About the Event
High mountain areas are now experiencing amplified climate change, glacier melt, and permafrost thaw. The accelerating glacier retreat and permafrost degradation are associated with frequent rockfalls, landslides, debris flows and lake outburst floods from glacial lakes and landslide-dammed lakes. Greater amounts of sediment are mobilized, and fluvial sediment fluxes are increasing. Such mountain landscape instabilities can be largely attributed to climate change and are threatening infrastructure and livelihoods for billions of people. In this talk, I will give an overview of how modern climate change drives the icy landscape changes in the high-mountain areas of Asia. I will also discuss the implications of the changing mountain hazards and sediment supply for hydropower systems.
Register for the talk here.
About the Speaker
Dongfeng Li
Dr Dongfeng Li is a Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on how icy mountain landscapes and hydropower systems respond to ongoing climate change, using remote sensing, field measurements and numerical modelling approaches. He has published lead-author articles in Science, Nature Geoscience, Geophysical Research Letters, etc. During his PhD, he for the first time assessed the impacts of modern climate change on fluvial sediment fluxes in High Mountain Asia and its margins, for which he was awarded the IPCC Scholarship Award for early-career scientists and the Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize (the best PhD thesis in natural sciences in NUS). His research has been widely reported in news outlets including Scientific American and The Straits Times. He is now also the co-founder of the Chinese Geomorphology Club and the Associate Editor of JGR: Earth Surface. More details at https://blog.nus.edu.sg/geolidf.