REMATCH

The Building REsilience to Multi-source Flooding in Southeast/South Asia through a Technology-informed Community-based approacH (REMATCH) project was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council/Global Challenges Research Fund and involved an interdisciplinary research team to tackle the multidimensional challenges of flooding. The project was led by Newcastle University in collaboration with Dr Oliver Hensengerth from Northumbria University, and researchers from An Giang University, Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology, and the Asian Institute of Technology.

The aim of the REMATCH project was to explore recent scientific and technological advances and develop an innovative and effective community-based flood risk management strategy to build community resilience to flooding from multiple sources.

Many regions in Southeast and South Asia are particularly vulnerable to flooding which repeatedly affects millions of people. Due to the prevailing monsoon, abundant river systems and long coastlines, floods are often a result of multiple drivers, commonly including tropical storms, typhoons and storm surges.

Awareness and understanding of flood risk at the local to national level often remains low and most low-income communities do not have well-coordinated hazard reduction and management schemes in place. There is an urgent need to develop and implement effective risk communication and management strategies to prepare the local communities for future floods, with focus on pre-event disaster risk management and resilience building through active engagement with communities.

The REMATCH project involved five interlinked work packages:

1. Risk communication and knowledge sharing
2. Multi-source flood risk assessment and communication
3. Historical and cultural implications on flood resilience
4. Citizen science approaches towards real-time flood monitoring and warning
5. Measuring and building flood resilience

You can find out more about the research activities, team members and access research outputs from the project’s dedicated website.