Quantifying Community and Infrastructure Vulnerability to Floods: Implications for Land-Use Planning and Resilience

Flood-vulnerability assessment uses diverse and often incompatible methods, limiting comparison across community, regional, and infrastructure scales and constraining land-use and resilience planning. This systematic review, conducted and reported in accordance with PRISMA 2020, examined quantitative flood-vulnerability methods published from 2000 through 2025, a period spanning the emergence and maturation of contemporary quantification approaches. Scopus was searched on 23 January 2026 and updated on 28 May 2026. Eligible studies were English-language, peer-reviewed articles applying a reproducible procedure to quantify flood-related vulnerability, susceptibility, fragility, damage, loss, disruption, or coping or adaptive capacity; hazard-only and purely conceptual studies were excluded. Of 371 screened records, 144 were included. Data were extracted manually, with reviewer verification, against a standardized coding framework capturing application scale, method family, construct, data source, weighting, validation, uncertainty treatment, and planning relevance, yielding 217 harmonized indicators across 226 indicator–component assignments; where source studies left components undefined, indicators were assigned by structural position within the study’s own model, and otherwise by reviewer consensus. Community-scale studies relied mainly on composite socioeconomic indices; regional-scale studies combined geospatial data with multicriteria decision analysis; infrastructure-scale studies used fragility, probabilistic, hydraulic, and network-performance models, exemplified by Monte Carlo–derived fragility curves and Manning-based hydraulic models. Inconsistent construct definitions, limited validation, weak treatment of indicator interactions, and low transferability, the last arising from locally calibrated weights, census-bounded indicator availability, and damage models encoding local construction typologies, constrained comparison. Principal limitations are reliance on one database, restriction to English-language literature, and the absence of a common effect measure, unreported variance estimates, and methodological heterogeneity, which jointly precluded meta-analysis. For municipal managers and territorial planners, the consolidated inventory offers an immediately usable instrument: it allows existing local vulnerability metrics to be screened against a comprehensive reference set, component-level indicators measurable from current municipal GIS, census, and cadastral data to be selected, and those indicators to be embedded directly in floodplain overlay districts, zoning provisions, and stormwater requirements, provided they are locally calibrated before adoption.