An Integrated Risk and Resilience Assessment of Sea Ice Disasters on Port Operation.

Abstract

Risk and resilience assessment of disasters plays a critical role in decision making for emergency response and postdisaster recovery. Yet, there is still a lack of modeling framework that could capture the effectiveness of economic resilience under uncertain disaster conditions. The objective of this study is to develop a novel integrated framework that is able to help decisionmakers understand the effectiveness of resilience performance under various risk conditions. Using hazard data of the Bohai Sea and throughput data of the Port of Yingkou (China) as an example, the copula-modeling method was adopted for the risk assessment of sea ice disasters on seaport operations. This study shows that the Gumbel Copula method, with consideration of ice thickness level and area of ice cover, provides the most robust risk assessment outcome. In addition, a grid chart system with an overlap of a joint return period and port throughput change provides a straightforward understanding of resilience performance under different risk levels. In particular, economic resilience tactics, such as production recapture and effective management, were confirmed to be effective resilience strategies, especially when a risk level is high, as port operational losses can be avoided up to 86.8%. Overall, the study provides insights that could help stakeholders improve the effectiveness of disaster risk management through an improved understanding of the linkage between risk and resilience.