Learning From Each Other in the Management of Natural Disaster and COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study in Taiwan.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan has been one of the best performers in the world with extremely low infections and deaths. This success can be attributed to the long experiences dealing with natural disasters and communicable diseases. However, with different disastrous characteristics, the disaster management systems for communicable diseases and natural disasters are very different in terms of laws, plans, frameworks, and emergency operations. Taking the response to COVID-19 pandemic as a study subject, we found that disaster management for communicable diseases can be improved through a comparison with natural disasters, and vice versa. First, having wider and longer impacts than natural disasters, the plans and framework for communicable diseases in Taiwan focus more on national and regional scales. Local governments would need more capacity support including budgets and training to conduct investigations and quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, for quick response, the emergency operation for communicable diseases was designed to be more flexible than that for natural disasters by giving the commander more authority to adjust to the circumstances. The commanding system requires a more objective consultation group to prevent arbitrary decisions against the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, risk governance is important for communicable diseases as well as for natural disasters. Additional efforts should be made to enhance vulnerability assessment, disaster reduction, and risk communication for shaping responses and policies in an efficient and coordinating way.

Flood risk influenced by the compound effect of storm surge and rainfall under climate change for low-lying coastal areas.

Under climate change, compound flooding has resulted in severe disasters in coastal areas around the world. In this study, an integrated framework is proposed to determine the range of compound flood risk without the requirement of joint probability analysis between storm surge and rainfall. In the framework, the flood risks are analyzed under four extreme scenarios with/without the compound effect of storm surge and rainfall in the past and the future. From the end of the 20th century to the middle of the 21st century, the worst scenario shows that the flood area significantly increases by 92% for the low-lying coastal areas in southwest Taiwan under the compound effect of storm surge and rainfall if they are fully correlated. In the most optimistic scenario, the flood area slightly increases by 15% without compound effect (only storm surge is considered). To coastal flooding, the synchronization of storm surge and rainfall contributes much more than the climate-induced amplification of individual factors. When storm surge and rainfall happen at the same time, the extent and duration of flooding increase simultaneously under the influence of pluvial and surge-induced flooding. Risk analysis shows an obvious increase of risk level for villages originally at low risks, which require integrated countermeasures against the consequence brought by compound flooding in the future. The framework can be applied in other low-lying coastal areas to quantify the potential impacts on human and environment caused by compound flooding under climate change.