Seminar - Abbas El Zein - Vulnerability to Climate Change: Research Questions, Methods and Approaches

Wednesday 27 October 2010, 4.00 pm - 5.00 pm
Civil Engineering Lecture Theatre 2

A/Prof Abbas El Zein
School of Civil Engineering
University of Sydney

Abstract:
Adaptation to climate change is a rapidly emerging field which involves a number of scientific disciplines including engineering. Assessing vulnerability to climate of households, buildings, communities, infrastructures, economic sectors or whole nations is a vital step towards planning and implementing rational adaptation. It is also highly challenging owing to the multi-dimensional and multi-component nature of the exercise, with vulnerability determined by multiple impacts and highly dependent on climatic, technological as well as socio-economic factors. The talk is divided into two parts. In the first part, the rationale for adaptation research and the contribution of engineering to the field are briefly presented. In the second part, research by the author’s group in the field is presented, including the development of new stochastic methods of vulnerability assessment and their application to a group of 15 local government areas in Sydney.

Biography
Abbas El-Zein graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Engineering from the American University of Beirut, an MS in environmental sciences from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees in Paris and an MSc and a PhD in computational mechanics from the University of Southampton in the UK. He has around 70 publications in international journals and international conferences. His research interests include computational geomechanics, finite element analysis, soil and groundwater pollution, risk assessment and climate change impacts and adaptation. He is an international expert for the College of Experts of the ARC and a peer reviewer of Discovery Grants for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. He is associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Sydney.