Urban flooding in China: current status, causes and challenges

Urban flooding has become an extremely serious disaster in China due to global climate change and rapid urbanization, resulting in a prominent bottleneck that affects urban public safety and high-quality development. This paper provides an overview of the types and characteristics of urban floods, based on existing literature, disaster records, and statistical yearbooks. It also summarizes the current status and development trends of urban flooding in China. Moreover, this review discusses the main causes of urban flooding in China from multidisciplinary perspectives, including the changes in precipitation patterns, rainfall-runoff relationships, drainage networks, and urban planning and management. Finally, this work describes the primary challenges and potential future developments related to urban flooding. It is necessary to focus on the theoretical and practical exploration of data monitoring and information sharing, theoretical analysis and mechanism research, cause-driven and quantitative identification, early warning and forecasting, risk assessment and management for urban flooding in the future, which can provide the support to improve urban disaster prevention and mitigation, as well as the integrated management of urban flooding in a changing environment.