Study region The Limpopo River Basin (LRB) is a transboundary catchment in Southern Africa spanning South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. The lower basin, particularly the Chókwè–Xai-Xai floodplain in Mozambique, is highly flood-prone due to flat topography, climate variability, and rapid agricultural and settlement expansion. Study focus This study presents a climate-informed framework for assessing compound flood hazards in the LRB by coupling a process-based hydrological model with two-dimensional hydraulic simulations and copula-based multivariate statistics. Bias-corrected late-century (2065–2099) climate projections under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 drive hydrological simulations that provide boundary conditions for 2D hydraulic modelling of flood depth, velocity, and duration. Copula functions quantify dependencies among these variables and are used to derive probabilistic compound-hazard classes, which are intersected with land-cover data to assess exposure. New hydrological insights for the region Results reveal moderate, symmetric dependence among flood depth, velocity, and duration, best captured by a Gaussian copula, indicating joint intensification without strong tail asymmetry. Compound hazards increase sharply with return period and emissions pathway, with the Chókwè–Xai-Xai corridor consistently identified as the primary hotspot. Under RCP 8.5, high compound-hazard areas expand non-linearly, approaching ∼48,000 ha for 100-year events, compared with ∼5500 ha under RCP 4.5. Agricultural land shows the greatest exposure, while urban exposure peaks at intermediate return periods. The framework provides decision-relevant evidence for climate-resilient floodplain zoning, infrastructure design, and early-warning prioritisation.
Mathe et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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