Abstract
Urban floods research has been attracting extensive attention with the increasing threat of flood risk and environmental hazards due to global climate change and urbanization. However, there is rarely a comprehensive review of this field and it remains unclear how the research topics on urban floods have evolved. In this study, we analyzed the development of urban floods research and explored the hotspots and frontiers of this field by scientific knowledge mapping. In total, 3314 published articles from 2006 to 2021 were analyzed. The results suggest that the number of published articles in the field of urban floods generally has an upward trend year by year, and the research focus has shifted from exploring hydrological processes to adopting advanced management measures to solve urban flood problems. Moreover, urban stormwater management and low impact development in the context of climate change and urbanization have gradually become research hotspots. Future research directions based on the status and trends of the urban floods field were also discussed. This research can not only inspire other researchers and policymakers, but also demonstrates the effectiveness of scientific knowledge mapping analysis by the use of the software CiteSpace and VOSviewer.
Highlights
Published: 9 December 2021Global urbanization and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events as a result of climate change are serious problems for urban floods [1,2,3,4]
This work aims to study the development of the entire urban floods field and to present a clearer development process for readers combined with visualization software
The data for analysis were retrieved from the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)
Summary
Global urbanization and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events as a result of climate change are serious problems for urban floods [1,2,3,4]. They have caused massive casualties and economic losses [5,6]. As for the reasons, on one hand, climate change increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, with more intermittent rainstorms, more severe droughts, and higher coastal storm surges [9,10], such as the rainstorms in Europe and northern China in July 2021. With the development of social productivity, the progress of science and technology, and the adjustment of industrial structure in a country or region, society has gradually transformed from a traditional rural one Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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