Causes, impacts, and mitigation strategies of urban pluvial floods in India: A systematic review

This paper describes the current state of rainfall-driven flood research in India, focusing on how the scholarly community approaches the causes, impacts, and mitigation strategies in urban settings. Urban pluvial floods or rainfall-driven floods are often misrepresented as nuisance floods and tend to receive limited attention. In India, recent urban pluvial floods have affected population displacement, damaged infrastructure, and impacted means of livelihood.

This systematic literature review of academic databases SCOPUS, Web of Science, Science Direct, and Google Scholar asks: 1) In the context of India, how do we define urban pluvial flooding? 2) What factors cause urban pluvial flooding in India? 3) What are the impacts of urban pluvial flooding in India? and 4) What mitigation strategies should be adopted to cope with urban pluvial floods? Our close review of 62 articles finds that urban pluvial floods in India are attributed to extreme rainfall (n = 51), urban development (n = 44), topography (n = 34), drainage (n = 33), waste (n = 13), management (n = 11), and soil type (n = 7). The authors categorize the reported impacts of such floods as direct (n = 31) and indirect (n = 14) and the suggested mitigation strategies to cope with pluvial urban floods as proactive (n = 57), reactive (n = 6), and recovery (n = 10). This review provides a summary of urban pluvial floods in India and suggests new directions for future research.