🇮🇹Using Bayesian Networks for Climate Change Risk Assessment Against Scenario Analysis

Vuong Pham, Ph.D., CMCC@Ca’Foscari

Presented at the 10th Annual BayesiaLab Conference on Monday, October 24, 2022.

Abstract

Extreme weather and climate-related events, from river flooding to droughts and tropical cyclones, are likely to become both more severe and more frequent in the coming decades, and the damages caused by these events will be felt across all sectors of society. In the face of this threat, policy- and decision-makers are increasingly calling for new approaches and tools to support risk management and climate adaptation pathways that can capture the full extent of the impacts. In this context, Bayesian Network (BN) stands as a novel and powerful approach for the capturing and modelling of multi-risk against future ‘what-if’ scenarios.

Building on a risk-based conceptual framework, several BN models were developed, trained, and validated by expert judgment and database-driven to support multi-risk scenario analysis with various aims such as multi-sectoral flooding damages, marine cumulative impacts, ecosystem services assessment in different domains (e.g., freshwater, marine, and coastal, agriculture and industry). A major advantage across these applications lies in the possibility of combining heterogeneous data from multiple sources and across different domains, which is vital in environmental risk assessment.

The outcome of these applications represents valuable support for disaster risk management and reduction actions against climate change and extreme events, enabling better-informed decision-making. Furthermore, more ambitious development could involve the spatialization of the output of the model with a user-friendly interface, building on the GIS-based structure of the training dataset, to assist policy- and decision-makers in using the results of these applications to prioritize more efficiently plans for Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation.

Presentation Video

Presentation Slides

About the Presenter

Vuong Pham holds a Ph.D. in Science and Management of Climate Change from Ca’Foscari University (Italy) and an MSc. in Environmental and Geomatic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He has been affiliated with the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change since 2016, collaborating in the research activities within the projects of the Risk Assessment and Adaptation Strategies Division at CMCC@Ca’Foscari (Venice).

Vuong’s research focuses on multi-risk assessment, including the issues related to freshwater, coastal areas, and ecosystem services capacity associated with these domains. He and his research developed several BNs applications to support multi-risk scenario analysis with various aims such as multi-sectoral flooding damages, marine cumulative impacts, and ecosystem services assessment.