Geospatial assessment of urban flood resilience in rapidly growing Abbottabad City, Pakistan

Abstract

Urban flooding is one of the most recurrent and destructive natural hazards affecting rapidly urbanizing cities in developing countries. Pakistan faces a severe and growing urban flood challenge, yet spatially explicit, multi-dimensional resilience assessments remain scarce for fast-growing secondary cities. This study assessed urban flood resilience in Abbottabad City, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, by quantifying flood hazard, exposure, susceptibility, and coping capacity through an integrated geospatial framework. The Urban Flood Resilience Model was applied, combining remote sensing data, GIS-based weighted overlay analysis, and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to derive indicator weights and generate thematic component maps. Primary data on flood damages, economic capacity, institutional capacity, and educational level were collected through field surveys and questionnaires across flood-prone union councils. The final Urban Flood Resilience Index (UFRI) map showed marked regional variability. The northern and central parts of Abbottabad faced relatively high flood hazard, exposure, and susceptibility. Yet these areas showed high to very high resilience, because stronger infrastructure, institutional support, and coping ability offset the risk. By contrast, the eastern and south-eastern zones showed low to very low resilience. Weak coping capacity there worsened the effects of flood hazard and vulnerability. All AHP consistency ratios were within the acceptable threshold (Consistency Ratio < 0.1), confirming internal consistency of the pairwise comparisons. This assessment quantified both physical and socioeconomic dimensions of flood resilience, and the resulting Urban Flood Resilience Index delineated priority intervention zones requiring targeted drainage infrastructure upgrades, institutional strengthening, and community preparedness programs. The findings provide spatially explicit evidence for disaster risk managers, urban planners, and policymakers in Abbottabad and comparable mountainous cities of South Asia.