Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA.
Sci Rep. 2021 Oct 11;11(1):20085. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-99587-0.
Floods are among the costliest natural hazards and their consequences are expected to increase further in the future due to urbanization in flood-prone areas. It is essential that policymakers understand the factors governing the dynamics of urbanization to adopt proper disaster risk reduction techniques. Peoples' relocation preferences and their perception of flood risk (collectively called human behavior) are among the most important factors that influence urbanization in flood-prone areas. Current studies focusing on flood risk assessment do not consider the effect of human behavior on urbanization and how it may change the nature of the risk. Moreover, flood mitigation policies are implemented without considering the role of human behavior and how the community will cope with measures such as buyout, land acquisition, and relocation that are often adopted to minimize development in flood-prone regions. Therefore, such policies may either be resisted by the community or result in severe socioeconomic consequences. In this study, we present a new Agent-Based Model (ABM) to investigate the complex interaction between human behavior and urbanization and its role in creating future communities vulnerable to flood events. We identify critical factors in the decisions of households to locate or relocate and adopt policies compatible with human behavior. The results show that when people are informed about the flood risk and proper incentives are provided, the demand for housing within 500-year floodplain may be reduced as much as 15% by 2040 for the case study considered. On the contrary, if people are not informed of the risk, 29% of the housing choices will reside in floodplains. The analyses also demonstrate that neighborhood quality-influenced by accessibility to highways, education facilities, the city center, water bodies, and green spaces, respectively-is the most influential factor in peoples' decisions on where to locate. These results provide new insights that may be used to assist city planners and stakeholders in examining tradeoffs between costs and benefits of future land development in achieving sustainable and resilient cities.
洪水是代价最高昂的自然灾害之一，由于洪水多发地区的城市化，未来其后果预计将进一步加剧。政策制定者必须了解影响城市化动态的因素，以采用适当的减少灾害风险技术。人民的搬迁偏好及其对洪水风险的认知（统称为人类行为）是影响洪水多发地区城市化的最重要因素之一。当前侧重于洪水风险评估的研究没有考虑人类行为对城市化的影响以及它如何改变风险的性质。此外，在实施洪水缓解政策时没有考虑到人类行为的作用，以及社区将如何应对通常被采用以尽量减少洪水多发地区发展的措施，如购买、土地收购和搬迁。因此，这些政策可能会遭到社区的抵制，或者会导致严重的社会经济后果。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种新的基于主体的模型（ABM）来研究人类行为和城市化之间的复杂相互作用及其在创建未来易受洪水事件影响的社区方面的作用。我们确定了家庭选址或搬迁决策中的关键因素，并采用了与人类行为相适应的政策。结果表明，当人们了解洪水风险并提供适当的激励措施时，到 2040 年，考虑到案例研究，位于 500 年一遇洪泛区的住房需求可能会减少多达 15%。相反，如果人们没有被告知风险，则有 29%的住房选择将位于洪泛区。分析还表明，邻里质量——分别受高速公路可达性、教育设施、市中心、水体和绿地的影响——是人们决定在哪里选址的最具影响力的因素。这些结果提供了新的见解，可用于协助城市规划者和利益相关者在审视未来土地开发的成本和效益之间的权衡，以实现可持续和有弹性的城市。
