Climate Impact Asia
2. Coastal Hazards
3. Food Security
4. Tectonic and Volcanic activity
Predictive Sea-Level Rise Across Asia
Professor Benjamin Horton, EOS director and one of Asia’s leading climate scientists, studies sea-level rise and their impacts across Southeast Asia, where sea level is set to rise faster than anywhere else in the region. Prof Horton is researching past sea-level changes to calibrate models that will help predict sea levels of the future. While historic records of sea-level rise can be found in the Northern Hemisphere, in Southeast Asia data is limited to the last 50 years. In this episode, we travel with Prof Horton and his team to find natural records well-hidden in mangrove swamps. Mangroves act as carbon sinks and their samples can be radiocarbon dated to provide valuable insight into past sea-levels. With the tide flowing in and time running out, one last sample provides them with detailed records dating back over 20,000 years.
Over 70 per cent of the world’s coastal population lives in Southeast Asia. Here, more than 400 million people live in low-elevation coastal zones exposed to the threats of sea-level rise and coastal hazards like typhoons and tsunamis. Understanding the risks of coastal hazards in a rapidly changing climate system has never been so critical. Together with Associate Professor Adam Switzer, a Principal Investigator at EOS, we visit coastal labs across Asia, where scientists collect data to model mega-storms in the future. Watch the team collect data to help map the profile of Typhoon Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Super Typhoon Yolanda, one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded, and visit the massive boulder fields in Thailand left by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Climate change poses a threat to agriculture and to the way of life for many in Southeast Asia. Along with this threat comes many challenges to food security. Floods, typhoons, storm surge, rising seas levels, droughts, and increased temperatures form a myriad of issues that require urgent solutions to ensure the sustainability of even the most basic of foods – rice. Rice crops are acutely sensitive to changes in the climate. Over 90 per cent of the world’s rice is produced in Southeast Asia and is the staple food of more than 4 billion people. We travel across the region to look at rice research in the Philippines, water resources in Vietnam, and the latest in vertical farming in Singapore. Can science and technology work together to create a sustainable food future? We explore these challenges with Principal Investigator Janice Lee.