A systematic review of the status and dynamics of flood resilience studies

Abstract

Floods are responsible for over half of the world’s major natural disasters, affecting approximately 30 million people each year. With the global climate change context, flood risk is still rapidly increasing, and so must flood resilience within human society. People must enhance their flood resilience, manage and adapt to flood impacts, and prepare for future risks and uncertainties. In this review, we first outline the current global context for flood resilience. We then integrate the growing knowledge about flood resilience worldwide as a reference for future research and policy formulation, connecting past experience with future sustainable development. The thriving flood resilience research community has produced many relevant practices and programs. However, the rapid growth of research has led to confusion in defining relevant terms, increasing the difficulty of quantification and evaluation. Moreover, knowledge about the generative mechanisms and dynamic processes of flood resilience is still lacking. Existing research habitually makes worrying statements on a lack of resilience rather than exploring the knowledge system on flood resilience. Furthermore, flood resilience research and practice mainly concentrate on large cities, river deltas, and coastal areas where advanced facilities and governance are more accessible, exacerbating inequity. Since flood resilience is dynamic and involves interdependent processes on temporal and spatial scales, there is an urgent need for modeling and simulation tools to detect patterns and dynamics of flood resilience while considering its internal mechanisms. It is also crucial to focus on more vulnerable regions to address geographic biases.