Annually, the low-lying Niger Delta region of Nigeria, one of the country’s most flood-prone areas, experiences severe flooding that causes extensive damage to infrastructure, ecosystems, and socio-economic stability. Hence, accurate flood susceptibility assessment and risk mapping are crucial for supporting effective mitigation and planning, which is the focus of this study. To address this, an integrated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Frequency Ratio (FR) approach is used to delineate flood hazard zones and identify high-risk areas across the region. Notably, this represents the first application of the FR model across the unified Niger Delta, encompassing its six core states. The lack of documented flood-susceptibility assessments in this economically vital region underscores a significant research gap. Ten multicollinearity-free flood-conditioning factors, including rainfall, distance to river, drainage density, land use/land cover, elevation, slope, NDVI, soil type, curvature, and topographic wetness index, were analysed to generate a flood susceptibility map classified into five levels. The results indicate that 71.79% (26,297.21 Km2) of the region falls within the moderate to very high susceptibility category. In comparison, 28.21% (10,335.46 Km2) exhibits low to very low susceptibility, with Bayelsa, Rivers, and Delta States identified as the most at risk. The model achieved a reliability rate of 83.16% based on the ROC–AUC analysis, confirming its predictive accuracy. Overall, the findings provide critical, data-driven insights for policymakers and urban planners, supporting a shift from reactive disaster response to proactive flood risk management, and offering a transferable, robust framework for flood mitigation and sustainable development in similar flood-prone regions.
Hazzan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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