Climate change is increasing the risk of occurrence of natural hazard events at different scales and magnitudes across the world. In India, Chennai rains and the resulting floods are a recent example. While climate change is the prime factor, environmental degradation exacerbates disaster risk, affecting the degree of exposure of societies to floods, landslides, and other hazards. Conventional urban-flood-management approaches alone may fall short as they do not provide the services required to build resilience to deal with the heightened threats. Therefore, there is a need to explore hybrid solutions that harness the potential of natural systems, along with the man-made or ‘grey’ infrastructure that is traditionally adopted.
