Meta-analysis of urban flooding researches: identification of causal factors and used methods on recent studies

Abstract

In a broader research context, focused on the investigation of causal factors for the occurrence of floods in urbanized basins in São Paulo, a meta-analysis research was carried out on studies that focused on urban floods in different perspectives of analysis of related scientific fields (geomorphology, climatology, hydrology, etc.). It was sought to identify relationships between more associated concepts, more used methodologies and more pointed causal factors. The meta-analysis was carried out in two stages: a more extensive one, based on the worldwide base of Web of Science journals, and a more detailed one, on national bases of journals and repositories of thesis and dissertations. The data from the first stage were analyzed using bibliometric mapping and those from the second were indexed and analyzed qualitatively. The representativeness of researches on urban flooding originating in countries of humid tropical environment was considered significantly low. In the sub-area of ​​climatology and meteorology, there is a preponderance on the association of “floods” with climate change, while in geomorphology and geosciences in general, the most common association is set between the hydrological variable of runoff and urban impermeabilization. Among national studies, research is most commonly carried out using geoprocessing techniques and historical-documentary research, while the use of modeling is dominant only in the area of ​​hydrology. The results corroborate the original working hypothesis, which considered that the different areas of knowledge differ in methodologies for approaching the problem and, therefore, in the identification of causal variables, rarely considering those less usual in their approach.