Design of synthetic impact response functions for flood vulnerability assessment under climate change conditions: case studies in two selected coastal zones in Australia and Japan

Sustainable coastal zone management strategies are imperative to avoid extreme social upheaval in both developing and developed countries. There is an increasing concern that the current management practices for many coastal regions are unsustainable under changing environmental and climate conditions. Sea level rise is of particular concern in coastal regions, and few countries have planned to deal with the exacerbation of environmental decline in the face of sea level rise. It is therefore necessary to assess socioeconomic and environmental impacts of sea level rises to better understand the vulnerability of the coastal zones, as part of devising adaptive and integrated management principles. This paper presents a systematic approach in which relevant stakeholders in Australia and Japan were actively engaged in identifying and prioritizing issues relating to the impacts of inundation and reduced water quality associated with flooding. The extent to which these issues are likely to be affected by flooding is quantified using synthetic response functions, and the key issues of concern for flood impacts for coastal areas in Australia and Japan are compared. Synthetic response functions as developed in this study can be used to quantify the likely impacts of flood hazards of various magnitudes.