Since both the frequency and magnitude of flood will increase by climate change, information on spatial distributions of potential inundation depths (i.e., flood-hazard map) is required. We developed a method for constructing realistic future flood-hazard maps which addresses issues due to biases in climate models. A larger population is estimated to face risk in the future flood-hazard map, suggesting that only focusing on flood-frequency change could cause underestimation of future risk.

The study explores the effect of Anthropocene geology and the computational grid size on the simulation of shallow urban groundwater. Many cities are facing challenges with high groundwater levels close to the surface, yet urban planning and development seldom consider its impact on the groundwater resource. This study illustrates that the urban subsurface infrastructure significantly affects the groundwater flow paths and the residence time of shallow urban groundwater.

In a localized area with the same vegetation, an overwhelming propensity of shallow landslides on the south-facing slope over the north-facing slope could not be attributed to plant roots. We provide new evidence from the pore water pressure of failing mass, unsaturated hydraulic conductivity, water storage, and drainage and the hillslope stability fluctuation to prove that the infinite slope model may be suitable for elucidating the aspect-dependent landslide distribution in the study area.

To facilitate the meaningful participation of stakeholders in water management, model choice is crucial. We show how system dynamics models (SDMs), which are very visual and stakeholder-friendly, can be automatically combined with physically based hydrological models that may be more appropriate for modelling the water processes of a human–water system. This allows building participatory SDMs with stakeholders and delegating hydrological components to an external hydrological model.

Miombo woodland plants continue to lose water even during the driest part of the year. This appears to be facilitated by the adapted features such as deep rooting (beyond 5 m) with access to deep soil moisture, potentially even ground water. It appears the trend and amount of water that the plants lose is correlated more to the available energy. This loss of water in the dry season by miombo woodland plants appears to be incorrectly captured by satellite-based evaporation estimates.