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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Earth Sci.

Sec. Interdisciplinary Climate Studies

Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2025.1645693

This article is part of the Research TopicClimate-Environment Resiliency and AdaptationView all 6 articles

Comprehensive risk assessment of urban floods based on flood simulation and socio-economic vulnerability

Provisionally accepted
Bingyan  MaBingyan Ma1Jing  GuoJing Guo1Pengyu  ChenPengyu Chen1Leilei  ZhangLeilei Zhang1Huiliang  WangHuiliang Wang2*Yihong  ZhouYihong Zhou2Boyu  SunBoyu Sun2
  • 1PowerChina Huadong Engineering Corporation Limited, Hangzhou, China
  • 2Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Urban flooding has become a global problem, seriously threatening the healthy development of cities and the safety of people's lives and property. Urban flood risk assessment can effectively identify potential hazardous areas and provide a basis for the development of targeted disaster prevention and mitigation strategies. However, the current urban flood risk assessment research is mainly based on the flood inundation or indicator evaluation system, the lack of inundation characteristic and hazardbearing body socio-economic attributes of the comprehensive consideration, resulting in the assessment results and the actual flood risk there is a certain deviation. Therefore, this study integrated urban hydrological and hydrodynamic simulation technology and Fuzzy Matter-Element (FME) theory, proposed a comprehensive flood risk assessment method that takes flood inundation and socioeconomic vulnerability into account, and quantitatively evaluates the flooding risk of Zhengzhou City under different rainfall return periods. The results indicate that low-risk zones are primarily located in the peripheral and fringe regions of Zhengzhou, whereas high and very-high risk zones are predominantly situated in the central urban area, particularly in the western Jinshui District, northeastern Erqi District, and northern Guancheng District. These areas are the old urban areas of Zhengzhou City which were constructed earlier, and are characterized by low drainage system construction standards, aging pipe networks, dense population and road networks, and high economic value. The results contribute methodological guidance and decision-making reference for urban flood management and control.

Keywords: Urban flood, comprehensive risk, Fuzzy matter-element, Socio-economic vulnerability, Entropy weight method

Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Ma, Guo, Chen, Zhang, Wang, Zhou and Sun. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Huiliang Wang, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China

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