Review of Urban Flood Resilience: Insights from Scientometric and Systematic Analysis

Abstract

In recent decades, climate change is exacerbating meteorological disasters around the world, causing more serious urban flood disaster losses. Many solutions in related research have been proposed to enhance urban adaptation to climate change, including urban flooding simulations, risk reduction and urban flood-resistance capacity. In this paper we provide a thorough review of urban flood-resilience using scientometric and systematic analysis. Using Cite Space and VOS viewer, we conducted a scientometric analysis to quantitively analyze related papers from the Web of Science Core Collection from 1999 to 2021 with urban flood resilience as the keyword. We systematically summarize the relationship of urban flood resilience, including co-citation analysis of keywords, authors, research institutions, countries, and research trends. The scientometric results show that four stages can be distinguished to indicate the evolution of different keywords in urban flood management from 1999, and urban flood resilience has become a research hotspot with a significant increase globally since 2015. The research methods and progress of urban flood resilience in these four related fields are systematically analyzed, including climate change, urban planning, urban system adaptation and urban flood-simulation models. Climate change has been of high interest in urban flood-resilience research. Urban planning and the adaptation of urban systems differ in terms of human involvement and local policies, while more dynamic factors need to be jointly described. Models are mostly evaluated with indicators, and comprehensive resilience studies based on traditional models are needed for multi-level and higher performance models. Consequently, more studies about urban flood resilience based on local policies and dynamics within global urban areas combined with fine simulation are needed in the future, improving the concept of resilience as applied to urban flood-risk-management and assessment.