Advances in Urban Flood Modeling: Exploring the Impacts of Land Use, Climate Change, and Green Infrastructure on Flood Risks and Mitigation Strategies

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Land–Climate Interactions".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2025) | Viewed by 787

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Institute of Heritage Science, National Research Council (ISPC-CNR), Area della Ricerca, C.da S. Loja, 85050 Tito, Potenza, Italy
Interests: natural hazards; historical seismicity; historical floods; historical landslides; disaster response; natural hazard insurance; natural hazards and cultural heritage; heritage science; bibliometrics
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Urban flood is a frequent and severe disaster that occurs in major cities worldwide, causing socioeconomic and environmental losses that hinder sustainable development. Governments have proposed various policies for addressing urban flood problems. For example, the United States has recommended the implementation of the “Low Impact Development” strategy, and China promotes sponge city planning. In this regard, clarifying the factors affecting urban floods is fundamental for sustainable land management. In fact, the effectiveness of these actions relies greatly on having a clear overview of the factors influencing urban floods. Previous studies have shown that urban flood is significantly affected by both natural and anthropogenic factors.

Therefore, the goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers (original research articles and review papers) that provide insights on the recent advances in urban flood modeling. In particular, this Special Issue aims to explore the impacts of urban development, climate change, and green infrastructure on flood risks and mitigation strategies.

This Special Issue welcomes manuscripts that cover the following themes:

  • Relationship between land use changes and urban floods;
  • Relationship between land use patterns and urban floods;
  • Future urban flood risk simulation and prediction;
  • Impact of land use management on flood risk mitigation strategies.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Jinyao Lin
Dr. Fabrizio Terenzio Gizzi
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • urban flood
  • waterlogging
  • land use
  • urban expansion
  • impervious surface
  • green infrastructure
  • historical flood investigations

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

16 pages, 16081 KiB  
Article
Dynamic Assessment of Population Exposure to Urban Flooding Considering Building Characteristics
by Shaonan Zhu, Xin Yang, Jiabao Yang, Jun Zhang, Qiang Dai and Zhenzhen Liu
Land 2025, 14(4), 832; https://doi.org/10.3390/land14040832 - 11 Apr 2025
Viewed by 307
Abstract
Under intensifying climate change impacts, accurate quantification of population exposure to urban flooding has become an imperative component of risk mitigation strategies, particularly when considering the dynamic nature of human mobility patterns. Previous assessments relying on neighborhood block-scale population estimates derived from conventional [...] Read more.
Under intensifying climate change impacts, accurate quantification of population exposure to urban flooding has become an imperative component of risk mitigation strategies, particularly when considering the dynamic nature of human mobility patterns. Previous assessments relying on neighborhood block-scale population estimates derived from conventional census data have been constrained by significant spatial aggregation errors. This study presents methodological advancements through the integration of social sensing data analytics, enabling unprecedented spatial resolution at the building scale while capturing real-time population dynamics. We developed an agent-based simulation framework that incorporates (1) building-based urban environment, (2) hydrodynamic flood modeling outputs, and (3) empirically grounded human mobility patterns derived from multi-source geospatial big data. The implemented model systematically evaluates transient population exposure through spatiotemporal superposition analysis of flood characteristics and human occupancy patterns across different urban functional zones in Lishui City, China. Firstly, multi-source points of interest (POIs) data are aggregated to acquire activated time of buildings, and an urban environment system at the building scale is constructed. Then, with population, buildings, and roads as the agents, and population behavior rules, activity time of buildings, and road accessibility as constraints, an agent-based model in an urban flood scenario is designed to dynamically simulate the distribution of population. Finally, the population dynamics of urban flood exposure under a flood scenario with a 50-year return is simulated. We found that the traditional exposure assessment method at the block scale significantly overestimated the exposure, which is four times of our results based on building scale. The proposed method enables a clearer portrayal of the disaster occurrence process at the urban local level. This work, for the first time, incorporates multi-source social sensing data and the triadic relationship between human activities, time, and space in the disaster process into flood exposure assessment. The outcomes of this study can contribute to estimate the susceptibility to urban flooding and formulate emergency response plans. Full article
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