Financial Preparation, Disaster Experience, and Disaster Risk Perception of Rural Households in Earthquake-Stricken Areas: Evidence From the Wenchuan and Lushan Earthquakes in China's Sichuan Province.

Dingde Xu,Zhixing Ma,Kai Huang,Xin Deng,Zhuolin Yong,Wenfeng Zhou,Yi Liu

doi:10.3390/ijerph16183345

Abstract

Sichuan is a province in Southwest China that is famous worldwide for its earthquakes. However, few quantitative studies in China have probed the correlations between rural households’ financial preparation, disaster experience, and disaster-risk perception. Using survey data of 327 rural households from four areas stricken by the Wenchuan Earthquake and Lushan Earthquake in Sichuan, the ordinary least square (OLS) method was used to quantitatively explore the correlations between these three factors. The results show that rural households’ total family cash income, asset diversity, and whether rural households can borrow money from relatives and friends whenever there is a catastrophe such as an earthquake are significantly negatively correlated with the probability of disaster occurrence. Asset diversity and whether rural households can borrow money from banks whenever there is a catastrophe such as an earthquake are significantly positively related to the severity of disaster occurrence. The severity of residents’ disaster experience is not significantly correlated with the probability of disaster occurrence, but is significantly positively related to the severity of the disaster. The research results can provide useful enlightenment for the improvement of financial preparedness and disaster risk management for rural households in earthquake-stricken areas.

Highlights

With the intensification of global climate change and geophysical movements since the beginning of the 21st century, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, mudslides, and other disasters have occurred frequently, profoundly influencing global economic and social development
As for financial preparation, in terms of rural households’ internal-coping ability, rural households’ income diversity index was 0.5 on average, indicating that rural households have an average of 2–3 main income sources
Concerning the severity of residents’ disaster experience, 89.60% of rural households believed that their disaster experience was serious

Summary

Introduction

With the intensification of global climate change and geophysical movements since the beginning of the 21st century, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, mudslides, and other disasters have occurred frequently, profoundly influencing global economic and social development. Of these disasters, earthquakes are the most catastrophic, and disaster-risk management for earthquakes has become a hot spot in academic and political circles [1,2]. China is a mountainous country with frequent earthquake disasters [4,5,6,7]. From 2000 to 2017, there were 179 earthquakes with a magnitude of 5 or above in China, resulting. Public Health 2019, 16, 3345; doi:10.3390/ijerph16183345 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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