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Research

 Research Topics

Research conducted by the SKL-SBUS Hong Kong Base will include four distinct topics. All four research topics will be pursued through joint teams formed by the Hong Kong Base and South China University of Technology, combining complementary expertise and shared demonstrator projects across the GBA.

GBA Integrated Development & Climate Adaptation

• Cross-boundary climate risk analytics and scenario planning for the GBA, addressing heat, extreme rainfall, coastal flooding, sea-level rise, and compound/cascading hazards.
• Map heat/flood scenarios to public-housing estates, school catchments and clinic service areas; estimate risk, downtime, displaced demand.
• Interdependent lifeline disruption modelling with network criticality and restoration optimization, quantifying accessibility loss to essential services in high-density cities. 
• Co-develop GBA adaptation playbooks: zoning, drainage, cooling centers, school-closure triggers and healthcare surge plans, with equity targets.

• Performance-driven design methods that align low-energy/low-carbon targets with place-making, heritage conservation, and cultural identity in subtropical contexts.
• Climate-responsive comfort and health strategies: passive/low-energy cooling, humidity control, indoor air quality, and infection-risk mitigation under warmer baselines.
• Decarbonization of the existing building stock: scalable retrofit packages, benchmarking, and measured verification (POE) for high-rise, high-density typologies.
• Standards, toolkits, and guidelines that connect scientific evidence with professional workflows and regulatory implementation. 

• Reduce embodied carbon via optimization and circular components in public housing, hospitals and schools; publish verified LCA baselines.
• Performance-based typhoon–flood resilience for critical infrastructure, integrating hazard loads, failure mechanisms, and functional-recovery objectives.
• Equity-informed functional-recovery retrofit strategies, using modularity and redundancy to minimize downtime and displacement among vulnerable households.
• Empirical validation pipelines linking lab/field evidence to probabilistic fragility, indoor safety, service continuity, and post-event wellbeing outcomes.

• Fuse IoT, remote sensing and records to map heat, air-quality proxies, overcrowding, and 15‑minute access to schools/clinics and other critical infrastructure.
• District digital twins to test greening, cooling, renewal and mobility changes; quantify health benefits, equity shifts and carbon co-benefits; real-time performance tracking, anomaly detection.
• Hybrid AI-physics models forecast heat illness and clinic demand; optimize locations for cooling centers, outreach care and shaded routes.
• Open indicators and evaluation protocols: POE surveys, quasi-experiments, and dashboards for heat risk, IAQ, and service accessibility.

Please visit Academic Advisors for more information.