Perception and Action: Enhancing Urban Flood Resilience

New Zealand cities are shaped by a history of natural hazards. Climate change has amplified these risks, increasing frequency, intensity, and destructiveness, demonstrated by the nationwide impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle and the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods. Utilising anonymous cross-sectional survey and network analysis, this study responds to an existing knowledge gap to investigate the interrelationships between the perceived flood risk and perceived urban flood resilience using selected residential suburbs in Auckland, New Zealand, to support better alignment between urban residents’ needs and expectations for policymaking and implementation. Our study provides novel insights through identification of a Flood Resilience Perception cluster characterised by statistical associations between perceived flood risk and perceived urban neighbourhood flood resilience, namely, perception of safety from flooding, trust in local authorities, rainfall worry, distance from flooding source, perceived sufficiency in emergency response, and provision or receipt of assistance during flooding. These interrelationships indicate cognitive, behavioural and informational, sociocultural, and geographic and physical mediators collectively shape the perception of flood risk and resilience at the neighbourhood scale, supported by integrated quantitative and qualitative analyses. Our findings highlight opportunities for greater dialogue between residents and decision-makers through participatory flood risk governance, noting the gap between residents’ low awareness of existing digital flood risk communication tools and efforts to seek flood-related information, that can be addressed through improved engagement with existing public-facing flood risk provisions. The analysis pipeline is freely available and designed for use in territorial jurisdictions in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally to gauge community flood resilience.

A framework for urban pluvial flood resilient spatial planning through blue-green infrastructure

Green infrastructure (GI) has been increasingly associated with urban flood resilience as it provides benefits in protecting communities from flood dangers and improving socio-economic capabilities. In order to optimize the GI advantages, it is necessary to engage in strategic prioritizing of implementation areas, considering local conditions. Despite a growing interest in connecting GI and flood resilience, there is still a lack of strategic-oriented GI planning models aimed at enhancing urban flood resilience. This study has introduced the Flood Resilience-based Urban Green Infrastructure Site Priority (FRUGISP) model, which employs a GIS-based multi-criteria assessment to determine the urban regions that should be prioritized for the implementation of GI systems, based on their flood resilience levels. The model was used to map the priority areas in Monterrey, Mexico, and Brussels, Belgium. Despite their distinct features, both cities face flood challenges. The results showed regions of utmost importance based on the flood resilience index and land availability for GI implementation. The model has the potential to be applied to other urban areas grappling with flood issues, providing guidance to decision-makers in selecting high-priority locations for GI projects. This approach can effectively address the difficulties posed by urban floods, ensuring the resilience of urban areas.

A multi-criteria decision making method for urban flood resilience evaluation with hybrid uncertainties

In recent decades, climate change is exacerbating meteorological disasters around the world, causing more serious urban flood disaster losses. Many solutions in related research have been proposed to enhance urban adaptation to climate change, including urban flooding simulations, risk reduction and urban flood-resistance capacity. In this paper we provide a thorough review of urban flood-resilience using scientometric and systematic analysis. Using Cite Space and VOS viewer, we conducted a scientometric analysis to quantitively analyze related papers from the Web of Science Core Collection from 1999 to 2021 with urban flood resilience as the keyword. We systematically summarize the relationship of urban flood resilience, including co-citation analysis of keywords, authors, research institutions, countries, and research trends. The scientometric results show that four stages can be distinguished to indicate the evolution of different keywords in urban flood management from 1999, and urban flood resilience has become a research hotspot with a significant increase globally since 2015. The research methods and progress of urban flood resilience in these four related fields are systematically analyzed, including climate change, urban planning, urban system adaptation and urban flood-simulation models. Climate change has been of high interest in urban flood-resilience research. Urban planning and the adaptation of urban systems differ in terms of human involvement and local policies, while more dynamic factors need to be jointly described. Models are mostly evaluated with indicators, and comprehensive resilience studies based on traditional models are needed for multi-level and higher performance models. Consequently, more studies about urban flood resilience based on local policies and dynamics within global urban areas combined with fine simulation are needed in the future, improving the concept of resilience as applied to urban flood-risk-management and assessment.

With increasing global urbanization and climate change, urban flooding has become more frequent, making urban flood resilience (UFR) a critical research focus. This study assesses UFR in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region by extending the Pressure-State-Response model with a ‘Recovery’ dimension, integrating Nature, Economy, Society, and Infrastructure systems. Using data from 27 YRD cities (2014–2023), a CRITIC-TOPSIS model evaluates UFR, while Moran’s I and LISA analyses reveal spatiotemporal patterns. The XGBoost-SHAP model identifies key influencing factors. Results show: (1) YRD’s UFR is medium-to-high, steadily rising, with disparities narrowing and values concentrating at 0.4–0.5 by 2023; (2) A ‘high southeast, low northwest’ spatial pattern emerges, with high-high clusters (e.g. Jinhua, Shaoxing) and low-low clusters (e.g. Yancheng, Taizhou-JS); (3) slope and population density primarily drive UFR differences, supported by ecological, economic, and social factors. This study informs targeted flood resilience strategies and regional governance in the YRD.

Global climate change and rapid urbanization have increased the frequency of flooding, making urban flood resilience a critical objective. This article introduces a methodology for assessing urban flood resilience, utilizing a social-ecological synthesis index that integrates geographical and temporal data with Geographic Information System (GIS). The study focuses on ten administrative subdistricts in Wuhua District, Kunming City, China, and selects 18 social-ecological indicators. These indicators, chosen from social and ecological perspectives, are weighted using the entropy weight method to determine their significance in the assessment system. By combining scores for each subdistrict, the study quantifies flood resilience and creates a spatial distribution map using ArcGIS. Key findings reveal that out of the ten administrative subdistricts, five in Wuhua District, particularly in the core urban area of Kunming, demonstrate strong overall flood resilience. Influenced by social-ecological indicators, there is significant spatial differentiation in flood resilience within Wuhua District, with a decreasing trend radiating from the city center to areas farther from the urban core. The research indicates that regions with well-established transportation infrastructure, a wide distribution of government institutions, improved water management facilities, and a substantial population with higher education levels contribute significantly to enhancing urban flood resilience.

Ecological Flood Resilience Index (EFRI) to Assess the Urban Pluvial Flood Resilience of Blue-Green infrastructure: A case from a southwestern coastal city of India

Assessment of urban flood resilience based on a systematic framework

The main pond within the historic Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is an important component of urban blue-green infrastructure. This paper reports on flood resilience provided by the pond (simulated using the CityCAT hydrodynamic model), its water residence times (obtained using the Shetran hydrological model), and the ecology and biodiversity (vascular plants, bryophytes, aquatic invertebrates, phyto- and zooplankton, birds) of the pond and the adjacent area. The results show that the pond improves the flood resilience with at least a 27% reduction in the peak discharge during a 1 h, one in 100-year event. The area represents a biodiversity hot spot with a range of native taxa occurring among introduced plant species. The plankton community is dominated by diatoms, reflecting elevated levels of turbulence and a relatively short residence time, with an average value of 10 days. Analysis of macroinvertebrate community indicates a potential for water quality improvement. The results are discussed in relation to multiple societal benefits related to flood resilience, recreation, education, water quality, amenity and biodiversity value. The conclusions may prove particularly valuable for introducing practical measures in the water catchment, preventing waterlogging of the soil and ensuring an uninterrupted supply of public services. This article is part of the theme issue 'Urban flood resilience'.

Urban agglomerations face more complex flood risks than individual cities due to upstream water management, downstream drainage, and cascading secondary hazards. To improve disaster preparedness, this study incorporates climate resilience into a refined flood resilience assessment framework. The entropy-weighted TOPSIS method is used to calculate resilience scores and identify key influencing factors, while the 2-additive Choquet integral models the interactions between climate and resilience indicators. Results show that integrating climate resilience enhances assessment stability and enables classification into high, moderate, and low resilience levels. Targeted strategies are proposed for each level to support coordinated disaster response and resource allocation. The study also reveals negative interaction effects between climate factors and certain indicators, with diminishing impact over time. By identifying these interactions and formulating adaptive strategies, the proposed approach deepens understanding of urban flood resilience mechanisms and offers practical guidance for enhancing regional disaster governance and policy-making.

Driven by urban growth in hazard prone areas such as along coasts or rivers as well as by climate change induced sea-level rise and increase in extreme rainfall, flood risk in urban areas is increasing. Better understanding of risks, risk drivers and its consequences in urban areas have revealed shortcomings in the existing flood risk management approaches. This has led to a paradigm shift in dealing with floods from managing the risk to reduce damages, to making urban communities resilient to flooding. Often described as a complex and at times confusing concept, this systematic review identifies and summarises the different dimensions and approaches of urban flood resilience and how they are applied in practice. Our analysis shows that urban flood resilience as a concept has evolved over the last two decades. From an engineering concept with a strong focus on ensuring that the built environment can withstand a flood to a more recent definition as a transformative process with the aim to enable all parts of the urban system to live with floods and learn from previous shocks. This evolved understanding is also reflected in the increasing number of dimensions considered in urban flood resilience assessments and decision support tools. A thematic analysis of the challenges in conceptualising and applying urban flood resilience reported in the literature has revealed a number of issues including around fairness and equity of the applied approaches, a lack of data and widely accepted methods as well as uncertainty around changing risks as a result of climate change. Based on these findings we propose a new research agenda, focusing on meta studies to identify the key dimensions and criteria for urban flood resilience, supporting a transparent and evidence-led operationalization.

According to New Urban Agenda, the spatial plan has been promoted as an instrument to strengthen urban resilience. In the context of urban flood resilience, flood management measures could be incorporated into the spatial plan to address inundation and flood risks. However, the existence of a spatial plan does not necessarily reduce inundation and flood risks due to the ineffectiveness of spatial plan implementation and/or insufficient flood management measures. This study aims to examine flood management measures within Bandung’s spatial plan in achieving urban flood resilience in the future. We combine flood management measures framework and characteristics of urban system resilience as an analytical framework. The effectiveness of flood management measures is highly associated with the topographic characteristics and the combination of measures selected in suitable locations. We use thematic analysis to identify flood management measures in Bandung’s Spatial Plan and compare the result with the spatial distribution of future inundation and flood risks data from the previous study. We reveal that flood management measures in Bandung’s spatial plan have not been selected and located based on ecological constraints and future inundation information. This study demonstrates the importance of flood risks information to formulate an effective spatial plan for urban flood resilience.

Despite an increasing number of people exposed to flood risks in Europe, flood risk perception remains low and effective flood risk management policies are rarely implemented. It becomes increasingly important to understand how local governments can design effective flood risk management policies to address flood risks. In this article, we study whether high flood exposure and flood risk perception correlate with the demand for a specific design of flood risk management policies. We take the ideal case of Switzerland and analyze flood risk management portfolios in 18 flood-prone municipalities along the Aare River. We introduce a novel combination of risk analysis and public policy data: we analyze correlations between recorded flood exposure data and survey data on flood risk perception and policy preferences for selected flood risk management measures. Our results indicate that local governments with high flood risk perception tend to prefer non-structural measures, such as spatial planning and ecological river restoration, to infrastructure measures. In contrast, flood exposure is neither linked to flood risk perception nor to policy preferences. We conclude that flood risk perception is key: it can decisively affect local governments’ preferences to implement specific diversified policy portfolios including more preventive or integrated flood risk management measures. These findings imply that local governments in flood-prone areas should invest in raising their population’s awareness capacity of flood risks and keep it high during periods without flooding.

Urban Flood Resilience Assessment Based on VIKOR-GRA: A Case Study in Chongqing, China