Assessment of Population Size Impact on Flood Resilience through Scale-adjusted Transformation

Climate change has intensified the frequency and magnitude of extreme events, causing traditional flood-control measures to become increasingly insufficient in protecting communities from highly destructive disasters. Flood resilience concept used in disaster prevention strategies to resist, sustain, and recover from disaster impacts. The assessment of flood resilience index cannot be directly compared across regions, as population size influences many flood-related indicators. To address this limitation, scale-adjusted transformation was an approach to remove population-size effects. As a result, the scaled resilience indicators ensure cross-scale comparability and facilitate the identification of highly vulnerable areas previously masked by population.

Flood resilience typically comprises three major components: hazard, exposure, and sensitivity. After normalization, these three indicators are integrated into a composite flood resilience index. This analysis examines the impact of rainfall intensity and population size on resilience in different regions. The result anticipates that medium-scaled city are underestimated in resilience assessments. The findings demonstrate that incorporating scale analysis substantially enhances the comparability, reliability, and applicability of flood-resilience assessment across different spatial and demographic contexts. Through scale analysis, this study provides a practical analytical framework to support governments and urban planners in allocating disaster-mitigation resources more equitably, improving flood-risk management.