Schools and students are particularly vulnerable to natural hazards, especially pluvial
flooding in cities. This paper presents a scenario-based study that assesses the school vulnerability
of emergency services (i.e., Emergency Medical Service and Fire & Rescue Service) to urban pluvial
flooding in the city center of Shanghai, China through the combination of flood hazard analysis
and GIS-based accessibility mapping. Emergency coverages and response times in various traffic
conditions are quantified to generate school vulnerability under normal no-flood and 100-y pluvial
flood scenarios. The findings indicate that severe pluvial flooding could lead to proportionate and
linear impacts on emergency response provision to schools in the city. Only 11% of all the schools is
predicted to be completely unreachable (very high vulnerability) during flood emergency but the
majority of the schools would experience significant delay in the travel times of emergency responses.
In this case, appropriate adaptations need to be particularly targeted for specific hot-spot areas
(e.g., new urbanized zones) and crunch times (e.g., rush hours)
