Assessment of regional vulnerability to natural hazards in China using a DEA model

Jianyi Huang,Li Ma,Yi Liu

doi:10.1007/s13753-011-0010-y

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for quantifying regional vulnerability to natural hazards in China. In recent decades, the study of vulnerability has gained a position of centrality in natural hazards research. How to quantitatively assess vulnerability has raised much interest in academia. Researchers have proposed a variety of methods for quantitative assessment. But these methods are very sensitive to weights set for subindices. As a result, analytic results are often less convincing. A model based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used for the assessment of regional vulnerability to natural hazards in an attempt to improve existing analytical methods. Using a regional natural disaster system framework, this article constructs an input-output DEA model for the assessment of regional vulnerability, and takes China’s mainland as a case study area. The result shows that the overall level of vulnerability to natural hazards in mainland China is high. The geographical pattern is that vulnerability is highest in western China, followed by diminishing vulnerability in central China, and lowest vulnerability levels in eastern China. There is a negative correlation between the level of regional vulnerability and level of regional economic development. Generally speaking, the more economically developed a region, the lower its regional vulnerability.

Highlights

Steady global environmental and climate changes produce natural disasters that have become an increasingly serious threat to the sustainable development of regional socioeconomic systems (Kates et al 2001)
Two principle factors are extracted from the indicators of exposure of regional socioeconomic system and two other principle factors are extracted from regional natural disaster losses (Table 2)
We obtained the production efficiency of natural disaster losses of the 31 Decision Making Units (DMUs) using the DEAP Version 2.1 software (Table 3), which can be used for the analysis of vulnerability

Summary

Introduction

Steady global environmental and climate changes produce natural disasters that have become an increasingly serious threat to the sustainable development of regional socioeconomic systems (Kates et al 2001). Studies were mainly descriptive and placed blame for catastrophes firmly on nature rather than on human endeavors, which can be seen as a form of “hazards determinism.”. Because such studies on physical processes can only explain what populations or areas may be exposed, this research was not sufficient to understand the degree to which people at a location are threatened by hazard exposure. Natural hazards may produce significantly different impacts on people and places, often depending on the severity of the hazards, and on their biophysical attributes and the socioeconomic characteristics of a locale.

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Conclusion