Flooding Emergency Plan in Yangtze River Delta, China by Cheryl Liang, Wenqi Lu, Zhiyuan Chen

The Yangtze River Delta (YRD) is a flood-prone region spanning Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui provinces, and Shanghai City.  The YRD region’s geographical landscape causes it to hold large amounts of water every June to July during the monsoon season and the frequent typhoons trigger flooding.

Excessive deforestation, wetland reclamation, overexpansion of riverbanks, climate change, and heavy precipitation all contributed to the threat of flooding in the Yangtze River Delta region. Widespread famine, damage to millions of acres of crops, and thousands of deaths resulted from the high frequency and severe intensity of these flooding disasters. The most recent flood event in 2017 caused 1.06 billion RMB, with 150,000 people evacuated, historically, these events have claimed millions of lives and caused extensive damage to infrastructure and major economic losses.

Cheryl Liang, Wenqi Lu, and Zhiyuan Chen’s YRD Flooding Emergency Plan aim to reduce the impact of flooding through the improvement of community awareness and preparedness and mitigation of flood risk. The Communication Plan included emphasizes the exchange of information between national-level organizations, provincial-level response, and field operations.

The NYU students highlight the urgent need to provide nutritious food to the populations impacted and to replenish the agricultural resources destroyed by the floods. The coordination efforts between the various agencies to ensure food security and to protect the food chain supply can be supported by high-quality data produced by various data collection methods such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS), drones, and other technologies as well as through community engagement and communication. 

Click here to read the full emergency plan.