Resilience patterns of human mobility in response to extreme urban floods

作者：Junqing Tang, Pengjun Zhao, Zhaoya Gong, Hongbo Zhao, Fengjue Huang, Jiaying Li, Zhihe Chen, Ling Yu, Jun Chen · 发表于：National Science Review · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1093/nsr/nwad097 · 被引用次数：95 · 研究领域：Disaster Management and Resilience、Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration、Flood Risk Assessment and Management

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.