Community resilience to floods: tracking top controls of insurance adoption.

Flood insurance penetration, the fraction of the properties in an area with a policy contract protection for potential flood damage, is a key indicator of community awareness and preparedness for risk. Factors influencing flood insurance adoption include geographic location, property attributes, availability and affordability of insurance, and homeowners’ socioeconomic attributes. The extent to which these factors control penetration can help assess the level of resilience, including financial capital a community has to be able to absorb and restore itself during and after the event, respectively. Here, we compare 37 factors in four categories: geo-hydrological, socioeconomic, claim-related, and property-specific across the continental U.S. at the county level from 2010 to 2019 to identify the top controls in the aggregated and the regionalized geographical domains. A Random Forecast model indicates that hazard proximity, property age, historical claims, and household income are the more important controls in the total aggregated domain. We then categorize the data according to geographic regions from high to low designated risk to analyze the resulting ranking structure of the top controls. We further assess the range of model error and quantify the individual predictor’s contribution. Insights are sought to improve the model for compounding extremes, especially for coastal regions.