Construction and empirical testing of comprehensive risk evaluation methods from a multi-dimensional risk matrix perspective: taking specific types of natural disasters risk in China as an example

Abstract

Global climate change, continuous economic development and accelerated urbanisation have increased the frequency and complexity of various incidents. Risk assessment is an important means to deal with different crises and incidents. Based on the systematic analysis of the basic connotation, attribute relationship and main contents of risk assessment, this study extends the traditional two-dimensional risk matrix to multi-dimensional risk matrix. On this basis, this study further proposes four comprehensive risk assessment methods, including total ordinal, weighted average, Euclidean distance and two-norm methods. Empirical research was conducted by selecting three types of natural disasters, regional agro-meteorological disasters, geological disasters and forest fires, in 30 related regions in China between 2010 and 2019. The results indicated that compared to the two-dimensional risk matrix, the multi-dimensional risk matrix can intuitively characterise and compare the all-round risk situation of different regions, periods, types and dimensions, which is more helpful for a systematic analysis and risk comparison. All four evaluation methods proposed in this paper proved able to effectively conduct comprehensive regional risk evaluations with consistent results. However, when considering the fitting coefficient between the results obtained by various evaluation methods and the comprehensive evaluation results, it can be found that the accuracy (i.e. fitting coefficient) of Euclidean distance method is significantly higher than that of the other three methods. In the last 10 years, the temporal order of natural disaster risk in China has been more volatile, with Beijing, Shanxi, Tianjin, Hebei, Liaoning, Ningxia, Zhejiang, Shaanxi, Fujian and Gansu experiencing higher volatility in the ranking of natural disaster risk.