Breaking vicious cycles of hydrological disasters and socioeconomic inequalities

Floods and droughts often worsen socioeconomic inequalities, as marginalized groups face disproportionate impacts and have fewer resources to recover. Inequalities, in turn, limit their ability to recover, and amplify the impacts of future hydrological extremes, creating vicious cycles of worsening disasters. Yet such floods and drought events can also serve as opportunities for transformative change, addressing underlying vulnerabilities and reducing inequalities. Progress in sociohydrology is essential for better understanding these two-way interactions, requiring case studies and models of human–water systems that account for uneven risk distribution, along with global comparative analyses using emerging datasets. We propose an interdisciplinary research agenda that combines sociohydrological modelling, critical social science perspectives on power and inequality, and the innovative, but carefully scrutinized, use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as text mining. This integrated approach can reveal context-specific dynamics, and help break vicious cycles of disasters and inequalities.