Graph Transformer-Based Flood Susceptibility Mapping: Application to the French Riviera and Railway Infrastructure Under Climate Change

Abstract

Increasing flood frequency and severity due to climate change threatens infrastructure and demands improved susceptibility mapping techniques. While traditional machine learning (ML) approaches are widely used, they struggle to capture spatial dependencies and poor boundary delineation between susceptibility classes. This study introduces the first application of a graph transformer (GT) architecture for flood susceptibility mapping to the flood-prone French Riviera (e.g., 2020 Storm Alex) using topography, hydrology, geography, and environmental data. GT incorporates watershed topology using Laplacian positional encoders (PEs) and attention mechanisms. The developed GT model has an AUC-ROC (0.9739), slightly lower than XGBoost (0.9853). However, the GT model demonstrated better clustering and delineation with a higher Moran's I value (0.6119) compared to the random forest (0.5775) and XGBoost (0.5311) with p-value lower than 0.0001. Feature importance revealed a striking consistency across models, with elevation, slope, distance to channel, and convergence index being the critical factors. Dimensionality reduction on Laplacian PEs revealed partial clusters, indicating they could capture spatial information; however, their importance was lower than flood factors. Since climate and land use changes aggravate flood risk, susceptibility maps are developed for the 2050 year under different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and railway track vulnerability is assessed. All RCP scenarios revealed increased area across susceptibility classes, except for the very low category. RCP 8.5 projections indicate that 17.46% of the watershed area and 54% of railway length fall within very-high susceptible zones, compared to 6.19% and 35.61%, respectively, under current conditions. The developed maps can be integrated into a multi-hazard framework.