Enhancing urban flood resilience: A holistic framework incorporating historic worst flood to Yangtze River Delta, China

Abstract

Rapid urbanization and climate change have increased the risk of urban flooding, causing massive infrastructure and human losses. The concept of resilience proposes new solutions to manage flood disaster. An urban flood resilience evaluation framework considering the flood disaster cycle of actual historic flood event and objective physical-socio-economic status is necessary for future flood mitigation. This paper proposes a holistic evaluation framework for evaluating urban flood resilience with VIKOR and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) method. The proposed framework consists of indicators of resistance, coping, recovery and adaptation capacity of resilience for three stages of the flood disaster cycle, namely pre, during and post-flood. The framework has been applied to Yangtze River Delta (YRD) consisting 27 cities in China. Following a rigorous analysis, the cities are ranked and mapped, among which Nanjing stands out to be the first, whereas the entire region presents a moderate level of urban flood resilience varying from city to city. The detailed comparison with sensitivity analysis of resilience at regional, provincial and city level suggests a better resilience in pre-flood stage than post-flood stage. Finally, practical recommendations to regional and local level are provided for further flood mitigation and resilience improvement. The proposed framework is generalizable and useful to develop flood related standards, establish benchmarks, perform evaluation at regional, provincial and city levels across China and other parts of the world.