Floods and Societies: Dynamic Modeling

There is growing concern that future flood losses and fatalities might increase significantly in many regions of the world because of rapid urbanization in deltas and floodplains, in addition to sea level rise and climate change. To better anticipate long-term trajectories of future flood risk, there is a need to treat floodplains and deltas as fully coupled human-physical systems. Here we propose a novel approach to explore the long-term behavior emerging from the mutual interactions and feedbacks between physical and social systems. The implementation of our modeling framework shows that green societies, which cope with flooding by resettling out of floodplains, are more resilient to increasing flood frequency than technological societies, which deal with flooding by building levees. Also, we show that when coupled dynamics are accounted for, flood-poor periods could (paradoxically) be more dangerous than flood-rich periods.