Abstract

Climate change is a critical global issue, with recent decades marked by record-breaking temperatures and an accelerating rate of warming. These changes are already having profound effects on natural systems and human societies, particularly in vulnerable regions such as Southeast Asia and the Mekong Delta. In this presentation, I will introduce two key concepts for exploring specific impacts of climate change: climate analogues and compound hazards.

A climate analogue refers to a location whose current climate closely resembles the projected future climate of a reference site. Identifying such analogues allows us to “preview” what a location’s future might look like, based on conditions already experienced elsewhere. These analogues are typically identified using climate distance metrics based on temperature and precipitation. I will present these metrics and discuss the associated results, including analogue locations and areas of novel or disappearing climates at both global and regional scales, derived from the latest CMIP5 and CMIP6 model outputs and their downscaling experiments.

Next, I will introduce the growing threat of compound hazards. This concept refers to the simultaneous occurrence or rapid succession of multiple hazards within a specific area, which amplifies the risks and impacts. I will highlight studies focusing on compound meteorological hazards involving three individual hazards: high temperatures, heavy rainfall, and tropical cyclones. We analyse the characteristics and trends of these hazards, both observed in the past and projected for the future. Additionally, the compound drivers of sea level rise and land subsidence in the Mekong Delta are discussed, including natural processes and human activities such as groundwater extraction, sand mining, and upstream dam construction and management.

Overall, the talk aims to highlight how understanding climate analogues and compound hazards can inform better planning, adaptation strategies, and resilience-building in a rapidly warming world. Importantly, effective adaptation will require both coordinated government action and strong local engagement.

Biography

Dr. Thanh Ngo-Duc is Co-Director of the Department of Space and Applications (DSA), and Co-Director of the LOTUS International Joint Laboratory (http://lotus.usth.edu.vn) at the University of Science and Technology of Hanoi (USTH), Vietnam. Using modeling and remote sensing tools, his research focuses on the topics of natural disasters and climate change. He is the lead author of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2021). Dr. Thanh is currently the Chairman of the Scientific Committee in Earth and Environmental Sciences of the Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED). He received his engineering diploma and Master degree from the École Polytechnique (France) in 2001 and 2002, respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Paris VI in 2005.