Review article : a systematic review and future prospects of flood vulnerability indices

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.