Flood disaster resilience evaluation of Chinese regions: integrating the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets with prospect theory

Abstract

The aggravation of flood risk has been regarded as a serious threat to the natural ecological environment and the development of human society worldwide. There is a large population living on the banks of rivers, lakes and other flood plains. Since the introduction of the concept of disaster resilience, it has developed rapidly and has been widely applied in the field of disaster management. We introduce a new method by taking prospect theory as the main idea and incorporating the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets into the evaluation process. We illustrate its application through a case study of the provincial-level regions along the Yangtze River Basin. We find that the flood resilience in the west is generally stronger than that in the east. The strongest one is in Yunnan due to its unique natural environmental advantages while the weakest one is in Jiangxi because of its poor and immature natural, social, economic and management performance. We put forward specific management insights that consider different levels of resilience and the actual situation in each region.