Despite water shortages and infrequent rainfall in arid and semi-arid areas, their recent floods show that flooding tends to be more severe and life-threatening. However, flooding is a poorly understood natural hazard in arid and semi-arid areas and its management needs to address a set of challenges, some of which are unique to these zones. Hence, it is of great demand to develop a comprehensive understanding of Flood Risk Management (FRM) difficulties and needs that are significant in these regions. This review paper aimed to understand the current state of FRM in arid and semi-arid areas and to explore challenges existing in FRM of these zones, based on the authors’ experiences from practice-based research. The study identified four main classes of challenges: (i) regional features and flood characteristics, (ii) operational challenges, (iii) technical challenges, and (iv) management/organizational challenges. It was then concluded that these FRM challenges are multidimensional and coupled together. After discussing the challenges, the study addressed requirements and provided an outlook on solutions, further improvements, and possibilities for FRM in these regions.

Residential areas in developing arid and semi-arid countries are highly vulnerable to flooding, and water shortages have forced their inhabitants to live close to rivers. While climate change is expected to cause more extreme weather conditions in the future, adopting private loss-reduction measures can diminish flood risk. Although the number of flood models has grown significantly for developing arid and semi-arid lands, these models suffer from being incapable of performing micro-scale flood risk analysis and including household behaviors. This research work presents a novel socio-economic simulation model in the framework of flood risk management (FRM) to couple household adaptive responses with flood risk analysis. Agent-based modeling (ABM) embeds human behaviors in a flood-simulating environment. The focus of this research is the upper Kan catchment in Iran with a long history of severe flash flooding. Our results show the ability of the developed framework to address household participation in FRM activities through private precautionary measures. Moreover, the results indicate the importance of presenting such micro-level behaviors in flood modeling for a more realistic flood risk assessment. It is also demonstrated that household adaptation in a continuous way can lead to less flood risks in the region, even under climate change and the future economy. Finally, the results reveal that the remaining and diminished regional flood risks are influenced by the behavioral framework through which the individuals make decisions in adopting flood-loss-reduction measures. A similar pattern is, however, observed in household contributions over time among the discussed behavioral approaches.