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Given the climatic and geographical setting, Hong Kong is vulnerable to landslide risk. The poignant history of landslides catalysed the establishment of the Geotechnical Engineering Office (GEO hereafter) in 1977. Since then, a comprehensive Slope Safety System has been formulated and managed by the GEO which has effectively reduced and contained landslide risk through the implementation of multi-pronged risk management strategies. Inheriting the past success, the GEO has maintained a high vigilance of emerging landslide risk and planned ahead for the future enhancement in the System. Extensive studies for the enhancement of emergency preparedness have been conducted with a view to strengthening our capability of managing landslide risk under extreme rainfall. This paper firstly presents the key elements in the Slope Safety System in Hong Kong and then highlights the technical development work in landslide risk management, early warning, landslide emergency system etc., which have been undertaken for improving resilience of the Slope Safety System against extreme rainfall events that are becoming more frequent and intense under the effect of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Heavy rain events or rainstorms of various scales often occur in Hong Kong from April to September. In extremes cases, they lead to serious landslides and flash floods resulting in loss of life, and damage to property and infrastructure. With climate change, extreme rain events are projected to be more frequent and more intense in this region. A system to gauge and label the severity of rainstorms would be useful for identifying and communicating extreme conditions in warning and disaster prevention operations. In parallel, a better understanding of the characteristics of rainstorms would also be important for impact assessments and engineering design purposes. This paper formulates a practical framework to index the magnitude and severity of rainstorms in Hong Kong. An index termed as the Severity Index combining the magnitude of different rainstorm attributes is devised for quantifying the overall severity of rainstorms. This index is flexible to allow tuning for specific applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A spatial-temporal rain field generator is developed to reproduce regional rainfalls. • The generator produces likely future rainstorm scenarios considering climate change. • Correlations among temporal process parameters and different stations are considered. • Rain extremes may increase notably at the end of 21st century in Greater Bay Area. A stochastic rainfall generator is required to provide rainfall inputs for the analysis and mitigation of such hydrological or geologic hazards as floods and rain-induced landslides. This paper presents a new spatial-temporal rainstorm generator for generating simultaneous rainfall processes at numerous locations considering the spatial correlation among these locations and interpolating the point processes into an areal rain field. The generator is able to include the effect of climate change by adjusting the parameters of the marginal distributions of variables constituting rainfall events. A case study on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA), one of the regions that are most prone to storm-related disasters in the world, is presented. The performance of the proposed generator is excellent in reproducing the historical statistical characteristics of regional rainfall. The model is adapted to climate change through extrapolation of the variation trend of the model parameters in the observation period to explore possible future scenarios of regional rainfall in GBA. The simulation results indicate a significant increase in rainfall extremes, especially for short-duration rainfall, at the end of 21st century in GBA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]