Abstract
Abstract. Despite the increasing body of research on flood vulnerability, a review of the methods used in the construction of vulnerability indices is still missing. Here, we address this gap by providing a state-of-art account on flood vulnerability indices, highlighting worldwide trends and future research directions. A total of 95 peer-reviewed articles published between 2002–2019 were systematically analyzed. An exponential rise in research effort is demonstrated, with 80 % of the articles being published since 2015. The majority of these studies (62.1 %) focused on the neighborhood followed by the city scale (14.7 %). Min–max normalization (30.5 %), equal weighting (24.2 %), and linear aggregation (80.0 %) were the most common methods. With regard to the indicators used, a focus was given to socioeconomic aspects (e.g., population density, illiteracy rate, and gender), whilst components associated with the citizen's coping and adaptive capacity were slightly covered. Gaps in current research include a lack of sensitivity and uncertainty analyses (present in only 9.5 % and 3.2 % of papers, respectively), inadequate or inexistent validation of the results (present in 13.7 % of the studies), lack of transparency regarding the rationale for weighting and indicator selection, and use of static approaches, disregarding temporal dynamics. We discuss the challenges associated with these findings for the assessment of flood vulnerability and provide a research agenda for attending to these gaps. Overall, we argue that future research should be more theoretically grounded while, at the same time, considering validation and the dynamic aspects of vulnerability.
Highlights
Floods affect billions of people worldwide (Zarekarizi et al, 2020)
An increasing number of studies that built flood vulnerability indices can be observed in recent years, with about 80 % (n = 76) of the articles being published since 2015 (Fig. 2a), which is the year that the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR, 2016) was agreed among several member states
We calculated the increase in flood vulnerability studies in relative terms, based on a normalization according to the number of all flood publications in the Web of Science (WoS) database
Summary
Floods affect billions of people worldwide (Zarekarizi et al, 2020). according to the Emergency Events Database (CRED, 2019), around 50 000 people died and approximately 10 % of the world population was affected by floods between 2009 and 2019. Nowadays there is a consensus that risk (i.e., the potential for adverse impacts) is not driven solely by natural hazards (e.g., floods, droughts) but depends on the interactions between hazards, exposure, and vulnerability (IPCC, 2012, 2014). In this regard, vulnerability plays an important role in flood risk assessment. Vulnerability plays an important role in flood risk assessment It encompasses multiple social, economic, physical, cultural, environmental, and institutional characteristics which influence the susceptibility of the exposed elements to the impact of hazards (Birkmann et al, 2013; UNDRR, 2017). The need to understand and assess flood vulnerability has been highlighted by international initiatives such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (UNISDR, 2015)
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