新闻动态

Resilience patterns of human mobility in response to extreme urban floods

 作者:Junqing Tang, Pengjun Zhao, Zhaoya Gong

Large-scale disasters can disproportionately impact different population groups, causing prominent disparity and inequality, especially for the vulnerable and marginalized. Here, we investigate the resilience of human mobility under the disturbance of the unprecedented '720' Zhengzhou flood in China in 2021 using records of 1.32 billion mobile phone signaling generated by 4.35 million people. We find that although pluvial floods can trigger mobility reductions, the overall structural dynamics of mobility networks remain relatively stable. We also find that the low levels of mobility resilience in female, adolescent and older adult groups are mainly due to their insufficient capabilities to maintain business-as-usual travel frequency during the flood. Most importantly, we reveal three types of counter-intuitive, yet widely existing, resilience patterns of human mobility (namely, 'reverse bathtub', 'ever-increasing' and 'ever-decreasing' patterns), and demonstrate a universal mechanism of disaster-avoidance response by further corroborating that those abnormal resilience patterns are not associated with people's gender or age. In view of the common association between travel behaviors and travelers' socio-demographic characteristics, our findings provide a caveat for scholars when disclosing disparities in human travel behaviors during flood-induced emergencies. From China's most severe and unexpected urban flood event in recent years, we unravel the heterogeneity of resilience patterns in large-scale human mobility using a massive amount of mobile phone signaling data. For both scholars and practitioners, this paper provides insights to further understand the complex behaviors in collective human movements against severe climate-induced urban floods and sheds new light on the evidence-informed decision-makings for socially vulnerable populations when building urban resilience.

(来源:National Science Review. 10: nwad097 (2023). DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwad097)