Exploring human-induced flood risks and sustainable urban resilience in Iwo Nigeria with focus on awareness drivers and mitigation pathways

Urban flooding remains a persistent challenge in many cities in developing countries, often intensified by anthropogenic activities such as poor waste disposal, encroachment on waterways, and inadequate drainage maintenance. These practices undermine urban resilience and threaten progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11), which promotes sustainable and resilient cities and communities. Although existing studies largely emphasise the physical and infrastructural drivers of flooding, relatively little attention has been given to how residents' awareness, perceptions, and everyday practices interact to influence urban flood vulnerability, particularly in medium-sized cities. Addressing this gap, this study investigates the determinants of residents' awareness of flood risk, examines community perceptions of anthropogenic drivers of flooding, and identifies sustainable pathways for enhancing urban flood resilience in Iwo, Nigeria. By integrating behavioural and environmental perspectives, the study contributes to the growing discourse on community-centred approaches to flood risk management. Primary data were collected through household surveys and analysed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis (FA), and principal component analysis (PCA). The findings reveal that flood risk awareness is strongly associated with recognition of harmful environmental practices (0.891), knowledge of simple household preventive measures (0.924), and prior training on flood risk reduction (0.919). Residents' perceptions of flood drivers clustered around five key issues: community behaviours contributing to flooding (0.828), inadequate emergency response (0.851), poor drainage infrastructure (0.876), deteriorating sanitation conditions (0.847), and disruption of transport services (0.862). PCA further identified three major pathways for enhancing flood resilience: engineering and structural interventions (31.3%), institutional and service-oriented measures (26.2%), and ecological and environmental strategies (16.8%), jointly explaining 74.3% of the total variance. Overall, the study underscores the need to integrate behavioural change, institutional strengthening, and ecological planning in order to promote sustainable and flood-resilient urban environments.