Professor Heejun Chang returned from Sabbatical in Spring 2020 when the pandemic just started. Sponsored by the Abe Fellowship Program administered by the Social Science Research Council, he spent four months at the University of Tokyo's Center for Spatial Information Science as a visiting professor, followed by a visiting scholar appointment at Reed College. While in Japan, Professor Chang traveled around the Tokyo metropolitan region and the Hiroshima region in Japan and Seoul and Gangneung, South Korea to investigate urban flooding as it relates to extreme precipitation, urban development, and infrastructure management. The research findings stressed the importance of looking at legacy effects in current flood damage (Chang et al. 2021a). Additionally, he reviewed flood governance documents in Portland, Seoul, Tokyo and interviewed flood experts and practitioners to understand urban flood resilience better using the social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) learning framework. Findings of this research suggest that it is only in recent years that the cities have embraced more social strategies in flood resilience plans while technological strategies still dominate in their plans (Chang et al. 2021b). The lack of ecological strategies suggests that cities can better manage flood water and water quality with nature-based solutions (Chang et al. 2021c). He also continued working on SETS urban flood vulnerability assessment in six US cities with other UREx researchers, suggesting that cities can invest more in neighborhoods with overlapping social and ecological vulnerabilities (Chang et al. 2021d).
Chang, H., Eom, S., Yasuyo, M., and Bae, D. (2021a) Land use change, extreme precipitation events, and flood damage in South Korea: a spatial approach. Journal of Extreme Events https://doi.org/10.1142/S2345737621500019
Chang, H., Yu, D., Markolf, S., Hong, C., Eom, S., Song, W., Bae, D. (2021b) Understanding Urban Flood Resilience in the Anthropocene: A Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) Learning Framework. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111:3, 837-857.
Chang, H., Yasuyo, M., and Foster, E. (2021c) Effects of land use change, wetland fragmentation, and best management practices on total suspended solids concentrations in an urbanizing Oregon watershed, USA. Journal of Environmental Management 282, 111962.
Chang, H., Pallathadka, A., Sauer, J., Grimm, N., Zimmerman, R., Cheng, C., Iwaniec, D., Kim, Y., Lloyd, R., McPhearson, T., Rosenzweig, B., Troxler, T., Welty, C., Brenner, R., Herreros-Cantis, P. (2021d) Assessment of Urban Flood Vulnerability Using the Social-Ecological-Technological Systems Framework in Six US cities, Sustainable Cities and Society 68, 102786.
Figure. Examples of heavily modified stream channels in flood hotspots in Seoul. Pink lines show current streams while blue lines illustrate old streams (Source; Chang et al. 2021a).Professor Chang has also been recognized by Reuters as one of the world's 1000 most influential climate scientists, based on the number of publications related to climate change, citation ratio, and public outreach. He is the only PSU faculty and one of five Oregon climate scientists who are on the list. More information found here https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/climate-change-scientists-list/