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Pakistan is struggling to recover from last year’s cataclysmic flooding that killed more than 1,700. It was the latest in a string of weather-related disasters the country has faced over the past two decades, prompting calls to make hard-hit communities more resilient as they rebuild. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from the flood-ravaged Sindh province, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Months after historic flooding that killed more than 1,700 people, Pakistan is still struggling to recover. The UN is warning it might suspend its food support program for flood victims because it is running out of money. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Sindh, one of the hardest-hit provinces. This story is part of the series Agents for Change and produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Four months after a third of the country was underwater, Pakistan is still struggling to recover. The disaster affected more than 30 million people and is seen as a warning for other climate-vulnerable countries. As Fred de Sam Lazaro reports, recovery in the short and long term present complex challenges. This story is produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

This study investigates the impact of flooding on maternal health outcomes among pregnant women in rural Hyderabad, Pakistan, using a mixed-methods approach combining retrospective facility record analysis (pre- and post-flood data), quantitative surveys (n=400), and qualitative interviews (n=10). Pre- and post-flood comparisons of facility records revealed severe healthcare disruptions, with antenatal care visits declining by 60% (120±25 to 48±18/month, p<0.001) and cesarean section availability dropping from 90% to 35% post-flood. Neonatal mortality nearly tripled (12 to 34 deaths/1,000 live births, p=0.002) based on health facility data. Flood-exposed women showed significantly higher stress levels (β=3.8, p<0.001), food insecurity (β=2.3, p<0.001), and reduced satisfaction with healthcare access (2.1±1.0 vs 8.3±1.3, p<0.001). Effect sizes (Cohen's d) and β coefficients were derived from multivariate regression and between-group comparisons, with models adjusted for confounders such as income, education, and access to transport. Qualitative findings identified three key themes: (1) transportation and infrastructure barriers, (2) profound psychological distress, and (3) reliance on traditional midwives due to system failures. The study highlights critical gaps in emergency preparedness and maternal health knowledge, with flood-affected women scoring significantly lower on measures of health awareness (e.g., 3.2±1.5 vs 7.5±1.4 for water purification knowledge, p<0.001). These findings demonstrate the urgent need for flood-resilient maternal health services and targeted community education programs in vulnerable regions. Cette étude examine l'impact des inondations sur la santé maternelle chez les femmes enceintes en milieu rural à Hyderabad, au Pakistan, en recourant à une approche mixte combinant des enquêtes quantitatives (n=400) et des entretiens qualitatifs (n=10). Les résultats révèlent de graves perturbations des soins de santé, avec une baisse de 60 % des visites prénatales (de 120 ± 25 à 48 ± 18 par mois, p < 0,001) et une disponibilité des accouchements par césarienne passant de 90 % à 35 % après les inondations. La mortalité néonatale a presque triplé (de 12 à 34 décès pour 1 000 naissances vivantes, p = 0,002). Les femmes exposées aux inondations ont montré des niveaux de stress significativement plus élevés (β=3.8, p<0.001), une insécurité alimentaire accrue (β=2.3, p<0.001) et une satisfaction réduite quant à l'accès aux soins de santé (2.1±1.0 contre 8.3±1.3, p<0.001). Les résultats qualitatifs ont mis en évidence trois thèmes clés : (1) les obstacles liés au transport et aux infrastructures, (2) une détresse psychologique profonde, et (3) le recours aux sages-femmes traditionnelles en raison des défaillances du système. L'étude met en évidence d'importantes lacunes en matière de préparation aux situations d'urgence et de sensibilisation à la santé maternelle, les femmes touchées par les inondations obtenant des scores nettement plus faibles sur les mesures de connaissances sanitaires (par exemple, 3.2±1.5 contre 7.5±1.4 pour la connaissance de la purification de l'eau, p<0.001). Ces résultats soulignent l'urgence de mettre en place des services de santé maternelle résistants aux inondations et des programmes éducatifs ciblés auprès des communautés vulnérables.

Global Flood Hazard Subject Category Winner, PROSE Awards 2019, Earth Science Selected from more than 500 entries, demonstrating exceptional scholarship and making a significant contribution to the field of study.Flooding is a costly natural disaster in terms of damage to land, property and infrastructure.

Laboratory experiments are a viable approach for improving process understanding and generating data for the validation of computational models. However, laboratory-scale models of urban flooding in street networks are often distorted, i.e. different scale factors are used in the horizontal and vertical directions. This may result in artefacts when transposing the laboratory observations to the prototype scale (e.g. alteration of secondary currents or of the relative importance of frictional resistance). The magnitude of such artefacts was not studied in the past for the specific case of urban flooding. Here, we present a preliminary assessment of these artefacts based on the reanalysis of two recent experimental datasets related to flooding of a group of buildings and of an entire urban district, respectively. The results reveal that, in the tested configurations, the influence of model distortion on the upscaled values of water depths and discharges are both of the order of 10 %. This research contributes to the advancement of our knowledge of small-scale physical processes involved in urban flooding, which are either explicitly modelled or parametrized in urban hydrology models.

In the context of large-scale urban flood modeling, porosity shallow-water models enable a considerable speed-up in computations while preserving information on subgrid topography. Over the last two decades, major improvements have been brought to these models, but a single generally accepted model formulation has not yet been reached. Instead, existing models vary in many respects. Some studies define porosity parameters at the scale of the computational cells or cell interfaces, while others treat the urban area as a continuum and introduce statistically defined porosity parameters. The porosity parameters are considered either isotropic or anisotropic and depth-independent or depth-dependent. The underlying flow models are based either on the full shallow-water equations or approximations thereof, with various flow resistance parameterizations. Here, we provide a review of the spectrum of porosity models developed so far for large-scale urban flood modeling.

Primarily written as course material on flood control and drainage engineering for advanced students of civil engineering, this new fourth edition is again thoroughly revised. It accommodates recent developments in remote sensing, information technology and GIS technology. New added material deals with flood management due to Tsunami waves, flooding due to dam failure and breaking of embankments, application of dredging technologies, problems of flood forecasting, flood plain prioritization and flood hazard zoning, and engineering measures for flood control. Drainage improvement is tackled, with particular regard to salinity and coastal aquifer management from the ingress of sea water. The book includes design problem-solving and case studies, making it practical and applications-oriented. The subject matter will be of considerable interest to civil engineers, agricultural engineers, architects and town planners, as well as other government and non-government organizations.

Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481–221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC–AD 220) China. In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.

Extreme floods cause enormous damage in floodplains, which levees cannot prevent. Therefore, it is vital for spatial planning to provide space for water retention in these areas. Land use planners, water management agencies, landowners, and policymakers all agree on this challenge, but attempts to make the space for rivers to provide retention are generally not very successful. Adopting an innovative interdisciplinary approach, this book examines how society can manage the use of the floodplains along rivers in the face of extreme floods, focusing in particular on the relation between social arrangements and the elemental forces of floods. The book firstly analyses why contemporary floodplain management is so often clumsy and ineffective by looking at various real-life situations in Germany, using Cultural Theory to provide a much-needed, but previously neglected social perspective. These analyses show a pattern of activity resulting from different rationalities which dominate the floodplains in different phases. During extreme floods, it is rational to manage floodplains as dangerous areas; sandbags and disaster management dominate the scene. After some time, the rationality of control takes over the floodplain management; policymakers discuss flood risk and water managers build levees. When public attention diminishes, floodplains become inconspicuous until more and more stakeholders regard floodplains as profitable land. The current system of planning, law, and property rights even encourages stakeholders to act out their plural rationalities. A permanent dynamic imbalance of different rationalities leads to a robust social construction of the floodplains which results in viable but clumsy floodplains. In the course of time, however, the patterns of activity in the floodplains lead to an increase in intensity and frequency of extreme floods, and to more vulnerable potential damages in the floodplains. Risk increases. Coping with this situation needs another ki