Socio‐Hydrology Modeling Captures How Inequalities Impact Community Flood Resilience

Abstract

Socio‐hydrology models explore interactions between human and hydrological systems, enabling the analysis of dynamic feedbacks between society and flooding. Simplified conceptual models of socio‐hydrology often treat the social or human domain as single homogenous entities, failing to account for disparities among the communities that make up a city, and thus underestimating the true impacts of flooding on vulnerable populations. We propose a disaggregated socio‐hydrology model that incorporates a Resilience domain to capture differences among communities within a single city. Using empirical socioeconomic data from United States metropolitan areas, we inform the model's representation of inequality and its influence on community‐level adaptive capacities. With the further addition of a disaster relief component, our approach captures community‐specific recovery trajectories, linking economic inequalities to urban flood resilience. Results show that a community's adaptive capacity is shaped by a city's overall growth rate and the degree of economic disparities between communities. We find that improving a city's economic growth rate can unintentionally widen disparities in community adaptive capacity, consistent with the Kuznets curve hypothesis. However, simulations show that equitable resource allocation reduces recovery gaps without hindering overall city growth. Our results emphasize the necessity of incorporating socioeconomic heterogeneity into socio‐hydrological models to inform equitable disaster response policies. By grounding resilience in empirical economic data, this study advances socio‐hydrology modeling to provide more actionable insights for disaster response and community‐based risk reduction strategies.