Hydrometeorological hazards, particularly floods and cyclones, pose significant threats to human health, including fatalities, damage to healthcare facilities (HCFs), and disruptions to health services. This study systematically reviewed scientific articles to identify the direct and indirect impacts of floods on HCFs and the risk management strategies implemented to address these challenges. To that end, we searched four databases (MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science and Scopus) for articles written in English. Our search query included terms related to flood and cyclone hazards, HCF types and disaster risk management strategies. We followed the PRISMA guidelines to conduct the study. The search resulted in 7500 records, which were finally filtered down to 74 studies after removing duplicates, screening records and full article eligibility checks. Approximately 76 % of the included studies addressed cyclone-related flood impacts and were conducted in the United States. Hospitals were the most studied HCFs (n = 54) followed by long-term care facilities (n = 11). The main impact of floods on hospitals was due to flooded basements as they house important services including equipment, supplies and backup generators. Interruptions of electricity and water supplies were reported to cause serious challenges. Regarding flood risk management, patient evacuation was mentioned by more than 66 % of the studies while few studies reported the implementation of structural measures. More than a third of the studies reported the availability of preparedness plans. The review revealed inconsistencies in the flood preparedness of HCFs. The main policy recommendations are the availability of guidelines to standardize preparedness plans and oversight.

Introduction: The 2021 European floods in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands significantly impacted healthcare. With climate change increasing flood risks, healthcare preparedness is essential. Floods affect healthcare directly and indirectly by disrupting patient access, damaging infrastructure and impeding care continuity. Our interdisciplinary research in the Netherlands systematically assesses flood impacts on healthcare, optimises disaster preparedness, patient logistics, and continuity and explores crisis governance, incorporating lessons from coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). Methods: Our multi-sited, interdisciplinary project titled “Pandemic lessons for flood disaster preparedness” includes literature reviews on: (i) the (in) direct impacts of floods on healthcare, (ii) disaster decision-making strategies and (iii) patient logistics during crises. Empirically, ethnographic methods (interviews, focus groups, document analyses, and observations) will: (a) assess hospital flood preparedness, (b) explore decision-making and crisis management strategies and (c) analyse the dynamics of health system governance during floods. Data from these sources and flood scenarios will inform models on healthcare impacts and decision-making, culminating in a simulation game for research and training. Discussion: This study offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to understanding and improving healthcare system preparedness for floods. By integrating diverse fields such as healthcare governance, disaster risk management, logistics and hydraulic engineering, we provide a unique lens on resilience. A key strength is the incorporation of lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing us to draw parallels between pandemic response and flood preparedness. In addition, our simulation game serves as a robust tool for translating knowledge into practice. However, the study’s reliance on collaboration with busy healthcare and disaster response professionals may limit engagement. Moreover, the absence of direct public and patient involvement in the research design, though partially mitigated by engaging representative organizations, presents a potential limitation. Lastly, the challenge of obtaining real-time data from flood events could introduce recall bias, but triangulation of various data sources aims to address this issue. Despite these challenges, the study’s integration of long-term data from recent floods and focus on healthcare-specific crisis governance provides valuable insights for improving disaster preparedness.

When multiple weather-driven hazards such as heatwaves, droughts, storms or floods occur simultaneously or consecutively, their impacts on society and the environment can compound. Despite recent advances in compound event research, risk assessments by practitioners and policymakers remain predominantly single-hazard focused. This is largely due to traditional siloed approaches that assess and manage natural hazards. Hence, there is a need to adopt a more ‘multi-hazard approach’ to managing compound events in practice. This paper summarizes discussions from a 2-day workshop, held in Glasgow in January 2023, which brought together scientists, practitioners and policymakers to: (1) exchange a shared understanding of the concepts of compound and multi-hazard events; (2) learn from examples of science–policy–practice integration from both the single hazard and multi-hazard domains; and (3) explore how success stories could be used to improve the management of compound events and multi-hazard risks. Key themes discussed during the workshop included developing a common language, promoting knowledge co-production, fostering science–policy–practice integration, addressing complexity, utilising case studies for improved communication and centralising information for informed research, tools and frameworks. By bringing together experts from science, policy and practice, this workshop has highlighted ways to quantify compound and multi-hazard risks and synergistically incorporate them into policy and practice to enhance risk management.

Study region: The study focuses on Kerala, a state in the southwest of India. Kerala is composed of 14 districts, each characterised by variations in topography, climate, and land use patterns. Study focus: This review critically analyses the literature on flood risk assessment (FRA) in Kerala, particularly after the devastating 2018 floods. Kerala has experienced sporadic floods in the 21st century, caused by localized heavy rainfall, rapid urbanization and improper management of water resources. The 2018 Kerala Floods was one of the most catastrophic recent floods. Nearly all 14 districts were affected, over 480 people lost their lives, and more than a million were displaced. Anthropogenic factors, such as encroachment on wetlands, sand mining in riverbeds, and inadequate drainage systems in urban areas, have worsened the impact of floods. Despite the long history of flooding, flood management in Kerala has struggled to keep pace with the increasing magnitude and frequency of these events. Factors such as outdated infrastructure, uncoordinated dam management, and poor urban planning have exacerbated the impacts of floods. Against this backdrop, this review on flood risk assessment (FRA) in Kerala evaluates and synthesises existing methodologies to improve understanding of current state-of-the-art FRA in Kerala and provide a foundation for more effective flood management strategies. New hydrological insights for the region: The review identifies that research conducted after the 2018 floods can be categorised into three broad methodological themes: Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Predictive Modeling (including hydrological and hydraulic simulations), and Analytical Approaches (such as machine learning, statistical methods, and multi-criteria decision-making). The spatial focus of the studies reveals significant disparities, with Allapuzha being the most extensively studied district and Thiruvananthapuram receiving minimal attention. The review identifies critical gaps in the literature, including challenges in translating mitigation strategies, urban flooding stemming from poor land use planning, insufficient integration of various flood sources, and limited research on compound extreme events. Highlighting the urgency of translating the quantification of hazard to mitigation and the integration of climate change projections, the article provides avenues for further research for FRA in Kerala.

Subgrid sampling (SGS) has been increasingly integrated into hydraulic modelling to refine terrain representation without excessively increasing computational demands. This study investigates the effects of SGS and nature-based solutions (NbS), focusing on flow velocities, storage volumes and mass balance stability. Using a rain-on-grid TUFLOW model, we simulate a 1-in-30-year flood event across different NbS interventions, including leaky dams, floodplain planting and bunds with floodable depressions. Results demonstrate that higher SGS frequencies of 11 significantly enhance terrain resolution, improving the representation of flow paths and floodplain activation. However, a lower SGS frequency of three introduces notable numerical artefacts, leading to persistent negative cumulative volume errors and misrepresenting water retention within the system. NbS interventions generally minimise peak flow rates, with bunds and depressions (Option 3) proving the most effective, achieving a storage volume increase of up to 162.83% compared to the baseline scenario. Mass balance assessments show that models without SGS overestimate flood storage, potentially misguiding NbS implementation and compliance with flood storage regulations such as the UK Reservoirs Act (1975).

Flood hazards can affect road networks by closing roads, extending travel distances and lengthening travel times. This paper innovatively integrates flood hazard, road network topology and vehicle vulnerability via a severity factor to assess the accessibility of exposed links and the performance of the whole network. The overall network functionality loss under different flood return periods is assessed by evaluating the functionality of each network link for cars and SUVs. The most vulnerable links are identified and used to assess the performance of the entire network using topology-based metrics such as average shortest paths and isochrones. The case study of Bristol (UK) is investigated. It is demonstrated that network status is a function of vehicle typology, with SUVs exhibiting naturally stronger resistance to flood than cars. This finding can support preparedness strategies of road networks in the face of future flood events.

Urban resilience to natural hazards could make our cities less vulnerable to adverse weather events. However, the implementation of resilience actions is currently not effective, as mechanisms to facilitate collaboration among involved stakeholders are missing. This paper for the first time explores causal mapping as a method to disassemble major issues of urban resilience into a more manageable understanding, and thus identify key objectives, barriers and opportunities in thinking “resilient cities”. In this study, a cognitive-mapping-based workshop was held to elicit information from stakeholders in the remit of urban resilience to flooding. The statements and connections identified during the workshop led a consolidated map, analysed using the StrategyFinder software. This analysis highlighted barriers related to data availability, silo-based approaches and lack of funding; it also evidenced shared goals, such as the need to protect the built environment and minimise impact from flooding. Overall, causal mapping resulted a powerful analytical tool for improving understanding of the complex dynamics of urban resilience, identifying key variables and relationships, as well as eliciting information from stakeholders. Furthermore, this approach facilitated systems thinking, communication and collaboration. This enhanced understanding is fundamental for advancing strategies for future planning, contributing to urban sustainability and liveability.

Hydraulic actions resulting in scour are a major cause of bridge failures worldwide. The development of scour is affected by various factors including structural geometry, river morphology and weather conditions. Detection of scour is often carried out using visual inspection-based methods. Visual inspection requires the expertise of divers which incurs high levels of risk, especially during times of high-water flow. Therefore, sensing technologies are becoming increasingly popular with the aim to supplement or replace higher risk visual inspection approaches. Specification of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems is an important activity for bridge engineers and asset managers. This activity can be assisted by SHM rating frameworks, the use of which gives evidence to support specification of monitoring systems for individual bridges. In this paper, three previously published scour rating frameworks are compared using a bridge case study database.

Visual inspection remains an essential tool for assessing structural damage. Damage detection is a challenging task for those specifying, designing, and deploying SHM systems. Often only traditional visual inspection processes are available to determine the type and extent of structural damage. For bridge structures in the UK, a regime of general (every two years) and principal (every six years) inspections is often followed. Such visual inspections are time-consuming and costly in terms of both labour and financial resources. Therefore, the possibility of completing more of the bridge visual inspection process offsite has many potential benefits for bridge owners and managers during the service life of the asset. Recent research conducted at the University of Bristol in collaboration with industrial partners has examined how to make the best use of metrics derived from visual inspection data when assessing bridge condition and planning maintenance activities. Recent research into which aspects of the current visual inspection regime in the UK could potentially be moved offsite has also been carried out. This paper summarises these research efforts and discusses how AI may be used as part of future enhancements to visual inspection data capture and analysis.

Digitalisation and the Internet of Things (IoT) help city councils improve services, increase productivity and reduce costs. City-scale monitoring of traffic and pollution enables the development of insights into low-air quality areas and the introduction of improvements. IoT provides a platform for the intelligent interconnection of everyday objects and has become an integral part of a citizen's life. Anyone can monitor from their fitness to the air quality of their immediate environment using everyday technologies. With caveats around privacy and accuracy, such data could even complement those collected by authorities at city-scale, for validating or improving policies. The authors explore the hierarchies of urban sensing from citizen-to city-scale, how sensing at different levels may be interlinked, and the challenges of managing the urban IoT. The authors provide examples from the UK, map the data generation processes across levels of urban hierarchies and discuss the role of emerging sociotechnical urban sensing infrastructures, that is, independent, open, and transparent capabilities that facilitate stakeholder engagement and collection and curation of grassroots data. The authors discuss how such capabilities can become a conduit for the alignment of community- and city-level action via an example of tracking the use of shared electric bicycles in Bristol, UK.

The conservation of cultural heritage artefacts often requires particular conditions and a bespoke setup. We investigate the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling to obtain high-resolution data of the present setup to conserve the SS Great Britain: the first iron-hulled screw-propelled ocean-going ship, preserved in its original dry dock in Bristol (UK). The conservation efforts focus on the dry air curtain to maintain the hull at low relative humidity to prevent corrosion, hence avoiding further degradation. The proposed computational model captures the key features, enabling the study of the air curtain efficacy, retaining an overall uncomplicated setup which is seen to be robust in a sensitivity analysis. The analysis of the transport of dry air focuses on the near-wall region, hence the interface between fluid and solid surface, in which exchange of species occurs, such as humidity and temperature. The near-wall fluid dynamics is described by the wall shear stress, divergence of wall shear stress, surface shear lines and wall shear stress critical points. The results provide a complete description of the flow near the hull surface and identify regions where the air curtain maintains adequate protection. The investigation highlights the use of air curtains on solid surfaces together with the analysis techniques necessary to describe the fluid dynamics. The modelling assumptions proposed are shown to be effective in investigating the air curtain. The solution to the computational model is compared to sensor data, showing good agreement on the ship's hull.

On-site sanitation systems (OSS), such as pit latrines, are an important source of methane (CH₄), with emissions increasing when they are wet, and this occurs when anaerobic conditions dominate. This paper presents the development of a model, which uses seasonal changes in groundwater to account for the fluctuating inundation of pit latrines, and, therefore, the associated CH₄ emissions from varying degrees of anerobic conditions are examined. Given that observed timeseries of groundwater table depth at high enough spatial and temporal resolutions are often difficult to obtain in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), inverse distance weighted (IDW) interpolation is used to generate values for a whole region, which is then used, alongside average pit latrine depth, to determine areas of pit latrine inundation. Outcomes are further informed with open-source contextual data, covering population, urban/rural split, and sanitation facility data, before using methodologies from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to generate CH₄ emissions data. As a case study, we use data from Senegal to illustrate how this model works. Results show total CH₄ emissions for the month of January to be ~1.69 kt CH₄. We have also discussed the potential use of satellite remote sensing data in regions where access to historical groundwater data is limited. Understanding when the pit conditions are most likely to change could lead to incentives for better management strategies, as well as a reduction in CH₄ production.

Housing in informal settlements often lacks construction techniques that adopt criteria of resilience to natural hazards. Smartphones are rapidly diffusing in economically developing countries. The aim of this study was to assess the current use of smartphones by the masons of the informal settlements of Iringa, Tanzania, and to identify pathways for improving their construction practices. Data were collected through a mixed method approach that includes in-depth interviews, surveys, and a focus group with masons. The results reveal that only a few masons received formal training, most of them have never interacted with a qualified engineer nor consulted trained professionals when needed. Most masons own a smartphone and they extensively use it to gather technical information from the web, transfer money through mobile payments, share images of construction details, and promote their work on social media. The broad use of smartphones shows potential for enhancing construction quality. This article presents a unique analysis of the use of smartphones in the construction of informal settlements in Tanzania, which could be extended to other countries. Based on the findings, new strategies are proposed to engage with local stakeholders and foster the exchange of technical knowledge for safer settlements via smartphones.

The visual inspection of bridges is a major undertaking for asset owners and operators. In the UK, visual inspections require inspectors to visit bridges on site and often at night and under unfavourable weather conditions. Therefore, it would be beneficial to move some of the visual inspection process off site. This paper studies whether the defect classification aspects of the inspection process could be conducted remotely using photographs. This study examines the defect ratings assigned by ten survey participants who were tasked with examining photographs from visual inspections of ten UK bridges. The survey results were compared with the results from the general inspections previously carried out for the bridges in question. From this data set, the differences in the ratings given and the extent to which defects are missed were examined. The results show that a higher number of defects were identified for a given bridge by the remote inspectors. Statistical analysis shows that aggregated defects rated by off-site inspectors tend to be more severe and of a higher priority rating compared with those from the on-site inspectors. The results also indicate that there is closer agreement between on-site and off-site inspectors for defects of a higher severity rating.

With the increase of the frequency and severity of flooding events, coupled with population growth, the risks posed to people from flooding is ever more apparent. This paper proposes a methodology to examine the risks posed to vehicles' occupants and pedestrians simultaneously in an urban context. Through considering stability functions of a range of vehicle types and pedestrian, a risk assessment profile for a vehicle occupant was derived. Using a historical 1-in-20-year rainfall flood event that took place in the city of Exeter (UK) in 2014, and a synthetic 1 in 100-year rainfall flood event, the potential risks posed to vehicle occupants were analysed. The results showed that for these events the potential risks posed to people travelling by car and caught in flood waters were likely to be more severe if they were to remain within their vehicles than if they were to exit said vehicles. Analysis of the changes in risk over time further revealed that if a vehicle was to become immobilised in flood water, they would only have a short timeframe (~10 min) before the level of risk increases. This is a critical finding, highlighting that remaining inside an immobilised vehicle during flood event and waiting for assistance may increase the level the risk the individual is exposed to, with the results showing the significance of such studies in reducing the risk of flooding to people.

Scour is a significant cause of bridge failure, and resulting bridge closures are likely to generate significant disruption to infrastructure networks. The management of scour-susceptible bridges is a significant challenge for improving transport resilience, but tends to be heuristic and qualitative. Such assessments often suffer from insufficient knowledge of key factors and require assumptions, which may increase their estimation and relative uncertainty. Analysis of publicly available technical documents reveals that various definitions of “risk” are adopted, as well as multiple approaches are applied. This paper has three objectives: (i) to illustrate the concept of risk in bridge scour management; (ii) to propose a simple scoring system to analyse existing risk-based approaches to manage bridge scour; and (iii) to analyse and compare such approaches on the basis of the obtained scores. A sample of nine documents containing bridge scour risk assessment practices or approaches was analysed using the developed rating system.