Overview of flood vulnerability index studies in Brazil through literature review

Abstract

This paper provides a Brazilian panorama of flood vulnerability indexes studies where 21 papers published from 2006 to July 2019 were analyzed. This research showed that 85% of these studies were published after 2015, therefore this theme is recent. The most-studied spatial scale is the census sector based on indicators obtained from 2010 census by IBGE and most studies focused on flood pre-event indicators. Additionally many papers created risk indices by combining flood hazard map and vulnerability index. In terms of stages for constructing the flood vulnerability index, the most applied methods are min-max for normalization, equal weighting and linear aggregation. The most-commonly used indicators are: per capita income, households with bathroom without sewage, population density, households with or without water supply and precarious households. In contrast, the gaps in the index creation are the absence of sensitivity and uncertainty analysis in all studies and validation in 95%.