Evaluating Flood-Adaptive Design Principles: A Systematic Review of Global Practices

Abstract

Flooding ranks among the most devastating natural hazards globally, affecting >1.65 billion people between 2000 and 2019 and causing direct economic losses exceeding USD 650 billion. Climate change trajectories consistently project escalating flood frequency, intensity, and geographic extent, while rapid urbanisation compounds exposure by expanding impervious surfaces, fragmenting floodplains, and concentrating vulnerable populations in coastal and riparian zones. Amid these converging pressures, the global flood management discourse has undergone a fundamental paradigm shift from resistance-based engineering towards multi-dimensional flood-adaptive design principles that embrace resilience, coexistence with water, and long-term sustainability. Despite the proliferation of case studies and sector-specific reviews, a comprehensive global synthesis evaluating the full typological spectrum of flood-adaptive design practises, their comparative effectiveness, and contextualised implementation guidance remains limited. This systematic literature review (SLR), guided by the PRISMA 2020 framework and drawing on 250 peer-reviewed articles retrieved from Scopus (2007–2026), addresses that gap by identifying, categorising, and evaluating global flood-adaptive design principles across five overarching thematic categories: Nature-Based Solutions and Green Infrastructure; Urban Water-Sensitive and Sponge City Design; Structural and Hybrid Engineering Approaches; Building-Level and Architectural Adaptations; and Governance, Community, and Spatial Planning Frameworks. Findings indicate that integrated multi-scalar strategies tend to outperform single-intervention approaches across the reviewed evidence, and that governance quality frequently emerges as a critical constraint on adaptation effectiveness across design categories. Significant disparities exist between high- and low-income contexts regarding the applicability of strategies, institutional capacity, and access to financing. Based on synthesised evidence, a Global Flood-Adaptive Design Framework (GFADF) is proposed as a conceptual framework that outlines differentiated implementation pathways for urban and rural settings across diverse geographic, climatic, and socio-economic conditions; the framework requires empirical validation before it is used as a decision-support tool. This review provides a theoretically grounded and empirically synthesised knowledge base for researchers, engineers, planners, architects, and policymakers navigating flood adaptation in an era of accelerating climate risk.