Understanding flood risk in the context of community resilience modeling for the built environment: research needs and trends

Floods can be devastating to communities and result in fatalities and injuries, negatively impacting the economy, and quality of life. This paper presents a review of community resilience research with a focus on flood hazard including recent advances in flood risk quantification methods and trends to integrate socio-economic factors. The focus of this review was placed on flood risk components including hazard, exposure, and vulnerability to move the current research from deterministic to probabilistic approaches in order to propagate uncertainties through flood modeling, damage, loss, and recovery. Both short-term and long-term impacts of different flood resilience measures are included. The largest gap identified in flood risk research was the need for a standardized quantitative assessment tool or framework that could measure the impact of approaches to improve resilience at the community level. That tool should include the interactions between the different community systems (physical infrastructure, economic systems, and social systems).