Collaboration on Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation to Climate Change Impacts on Urban Drainage Systems

Climate change, urbanization and aging or lower designed urban drainage systems and water infrastructure are three major driving factors for sustainable urban water management. As a global impact, climate change has caused more frequent intense precipitation in short period and extremely high or low temperature. Urbanization has resulted in rapid growth of population. Cities become more and more densely populated, especially in the rapid developing capital cities such as Oslo and Beijing. Natural vegetation areas are replaced by buildings, imperviously paved roads and parking lots, which have caused increasing of urban runoff peak values and total amount of runoff volumes; have also resulted in deterioration of the sustainable building environment in the aspects of large energy consumption, increased CO2 emission, damage to urban biodiversity and ecosystems. In contrast to the dramatic changes on urban surface, many parts of the existing urban drainage systems were designed 50 even 100 years ago according to the climate and residential as well as economic conditions at that time. As a result, when the increased inflows are discharged to the existing sewer systems, overloading of the urban drainage systems is unavoidable and the consequences are flooding inundation on surface (e.g. on road systems and in building areas) and underground (especially in house basements, underground subway stations, shopping mall) and combined sewer overflows (CSOs). China and Norway have long term collaboration in several areas of environment technology, renewable energy, aquaculture and agriculture. This planned research collaboration with Tsinghua University aims to strengthen collaboration between Norway and China in the area of climate change research, in particularly to promote knowledge dissemination and transformation on vulnerability assessment and adaptation to climate change impacts on urban drainage systems and enhance urban flood risk management of the two countries.