Environmental and climatic drivers of flood susceptibility and their interactions at the global contexts

As Earth continues to warm due to climate change, floods remain among the most consequential natural hazards worldwide. Flood susceptibility mapping has therefore emerged as a critical tool for identifying areas prone to inundation based on environmental conditioning and climatic triggering factors. However, the rapidly expanding literature remains fragmented in terms of variable selection, methodological approaches, and integration of climate dynamics. This study fills this knowledge gap by synthesizing critical academic literature on environmental and climatic drivers of flood susceptibility, published between 2000 and 2025. The review consolidates evidence on dominant environmental controls (e.g., topography, land use/land cover, soil properties, river morphology) and climatic drivers (e.g., rainfall intensity, duration, seasonality, climate variability, and extreme precipitation trends). Beyond narrative synthesis, the study develops an interaction-based conceptual framework that explains flood susceptibility as the dynamic coupling of environmental conditioning and climatic triggering processes. Findings reveal strong convergence around slope, elevation, urbanization, soil permeability, and rainfall intensity as consistently influential predictors, while compound drivers and climate variability indices remain underrepresented. The synthesis further highlights methodological fragmentation, including limited transferability testing, and insufficient integration of future climate projections. By adopting an interaction-based framework, this review emphasizes that flood susceptibility emerges from dynamic coupling between landscape conditioning and climatic forcing rather than isolated predictors. The study concludes by outlining priority research directions.