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Lookup NU author(s): Yimeng Liu, Dr Alistair FordORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2026.Flooding from short-duration extreme rainfall poses growing risks to rapidly urbanizing regions under climate change. This study integrates 2035 urban planning into simulations of extreme rainfall-induced flooding in the Pearl River Delta Metropolitan region. Results show that while urban planning has limited impact on reducing overall hazard, it plays a critical role in redistributing it spatially. Flood hazard and exposure in 2035 were assessed under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). Hazard decreases by about 10% in SSP1, remains stable in SSP2, and rises in SSP3 and SSP5, with SSP5 showing a 12% increase. Population exposure grows across all scenarios, with increases of 21% in SSP1, 25% in SSP2, 13% in SSP3, and 56% in SSP5. Asset exposure shows even larger increases, from 29% in SSP3 to more than 100% in SSP5. These results highlight that while urban planning can alleviate hazard locally, long-term resilience is dominated by socioeconomic development trajectories.
Author(s): Feng W, Liu Y, Zhu A, Mao J, Sun T, Xu Q, Yang Y, Su H, Wu W, Yang Q, Ford A, Garschagen M, Yang LE
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: npj Urban Sustainability
Year: 2026
Volume: 6
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 17/02/2026
Acceptance date: 01/02/2026
Date deposited: 14/04/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2661-8001
Publisher: Springer Nature
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00353-w
DOI: 10.1038/s42949-026-00353-w
Data Access Statement: All datasets used in this study are publicly available from the sources listed below. Land cover data is obtained from the Esri Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer (https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/landcover/). Daily precipitation data is obtained from the Copernicus Climate Data Store (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets). Observational daily precipitation data is from the China Meteorological Data Service Centre (https://data.cma.cn/). DEM data is obtained from the FABDEM V1.2 dataset (https://data.bris.ac.uk/data/dataset/s5hqmjcdj8yo2ibzi9b4ew3sn) and overlaid with CBRA building data (https://zenodo.org/records/7500612). ... [continues at] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-026-00353-w#data-availability
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