Enhancing resilience: Integrating future flood modeling and socio-economic analysis in the face of climate change impacts

This study provides a framework to integrate hydrologic modeling and spatial social analysis to better understand the socioeconomic impacts of climate change and the resulting relationship between the impacts of climate change and vulnerable populations.

The results found that, in every flooding scenario, flood extents and depths increase when comparing the past time period with the future. Further, the social analysis found a strong, significant relationship between flooding hot spots and vulnerability hot spots in the Domain 2 (the Paducah, KY, andCairo, IL) but not in Domain 1(Burlington, IA and Davenport, IA). Finally, the infrastructure analysis found that structures located in census tracts with the highest levels of social vulnerability in both study regions were significantly more likely to be damaged in the 100-year flood in both the past and future flooding scenarios.