Advances in Modelling and Prediction on the Impact of Human Activities and Extreme Events on Environments

There is an emergent consensus that people living in cities, together with the existing infrastructure and ecology of these urban areas and global environments, are at risk from the impacts of climate change (e.g. heavy rainfall) and human activities (e.g. land use). There are multiple uncertainties linked with climate change scenarios: i) the first one refers to the quantification of future emissions of greenhouse gases, ii) the second one is related to scaling issues at local and global scales, and iii) the third one is due to the availability of datasets used as input to calibrate and validate predicting tools. Furthermore, territories across the world have been continuously modified and adapted by a variety of human activities for needs such as drinking water, as well as the research for renewable energies and other resources. The construction of large dams and
reservoirs, or the excavation of canals in parallel to existing ones had a harmful impact on the environment. Across the world, human activities and engineering developments have also caused groundwater quality deterioration, waste disposal failures, erosion of coastal areas, and these actions have also endangered natural species and affected the habitats of ecological systems. Flooding events, periods of droughts, debris flows induced by dam break, erosion of coastal areas, and river embankments are just some of the issues and disasters that continue to happen more frequently and science is gradually improving its predictive skills to enable a better understanding of what causes these phenomena and to establish early warning systems. The duration of each of these events varies from a few minutes to hours or even days, and, therefore, it is extremely challenging to identify early warning systems that require the possibility to generate targeted evacuation time for each scenario. This increasing pressure on environments across the world requires improvements in the understanding of cumulative impacts of human actions and climate change to enable more efficient management of these areas for local and national authorities. The studies in this Special Issue provide timely inputs into growing needs across the world. Due to the continuously changing circumstances, future trends in the management of mountainous, river, and coastal environments will need to be dynamic processes based on adaptive management. It is a priority to keep assessing whether the existing management approaches are still effective in response to the increasing interactions between the environments, land use, and climate change on the global stage. Thus, studies in this Special Issue provide recent developments in effective tools that can better predict the causes of these natural hazards as well as the impacts that they can inflict on environments.