Assessing the impacts of climate change and dam development on potential flood hazard and damages in the Cambodian floodplain of the lower mekong basin

Study Region: Mekong River Basin Study focus: Climate change has become a global environmental and socio-economical issue potentially affecting river hydrology and downstream flood characteristics. Climate change and upstream dam construction are the two main driving factors in altering the hydrology in the Mekong River Basin. Cambodian floodplain is located in the vulnerable flood zone to be affected by climate change and upstream dam development. This study investigated the potential impacts of future climate change and dam construction on flood hazards and agricultural damages in the Cambodian floodplain of the Mekong River. Climate outputs from MRI-AGCM3.2S under different sea surface temperature (SST) scenarios and a large ensemble climate dataset (d4PDF) under 4 K increasing scenario were used as input to a fully distributed rainfall-runoff-inundation (RRI) model for future projection of flood in the Lower Mekong Basin. New hydrological insights for the region: The results indicated that the changes in extreme flood events (25-year flood) showed an increase of agricultural flood damages under climate change impact by 18–28% under different SST scenarios. These increases would be only 5–13% under integrated impacts from future climate change and dam construction. Under the 4 K increasing scenario, the agricultural damages for extreme flood events of 10-year, 50-year, and 100-year return periods would increase by 32%, 38%, and 39% for climate change impact alone and 17%, 29%, and 31% for combined climate change and dam development scenario, respectively. The climate change impacts would have more influential on increasing the magnitude of extreme floods than the reduction caused by dam reservoir constructions in the future projection in the Cambodian floodplain of the Mekong River Basin. The impact of dam constructions tends to have greater impact on reducing smaller extreme events; however, their impacts are relatively smaller for larger extreme flood events (i.e., 100-year flood).