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Because of global climate change and human activities, the occurrence frequency of extreme precipitation events is increasing steadily, which causes devastating flood disasters. The stability of a human body can be compromised when exposed to floodwaters, which definitely threatens the life of a human being. Therefore, the investigation into mechanisms and criteria of human instability in floodwaters can provide scientific bases for urban flood risk assessments and hazard reduction measures, and can also benefit the ability of emergency response. This paper summarizes existing studies on instability mechanisms and criteria for people in floodwaters. Based on the summarization, the application scope, advantages and disadvantages of these existing criteria for human instability are evaluated in detail. Even though the calibrated formulas based on mechanical analysis and measured data involve some simplifications, they can reflect the critical mechanical condition of human instability in floodwaters, and therefore show better universality in practice. Given the limitations and shortcomings of the existing studies as well as major threats in current urban flood disasters, this study also presents key future research directions, including the instability mechanisms and criteria of pedestrian evacuation in actual flood conditions and from flooded stairs; using big data technologies to obtain and analyze online resources of flood instability videos and images, and reasonably estimate the critical instability state to construct a dataset of body instability in floodwaters; conduct in-depth studies on the influence of body posture adjustment on flood hazard degree. Besides, it is necessary to promote the application of human instability criteria in the field of urban flooding disaster prevention and reduction, in order to minimize the disadvantageous impacts of urban flood disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]