Flood vulnerability and resilience assessment in China based on super-efficiency DEA and SBM-DEA methods

Abstract

China suffers frequent and severe floods that result in significant annual casualties and economic losses. However, as flood vulnerability and resilience varies in different regions and periods, it is vital that the temporal and spatial vulnerability and resilience characteristics are known to enable the government to make suitable arrangements for the distribution of relief funds and assist the regions to improve their disaster capabilities. Therefore, to reveal the relative vulnerability and resilience of the research object, this paper developed Chinese provincial scale flood vulnerability and resilience assessment models from an input-output perspective that accounted for socioeconomic, flood damage, flood driving and environmental factors. The Super-Efficiency Data Envelopment Analysis method was applied to the vulnerability assessment research and the Super-Efficiency Slacks-Based Measure Data Envelopment Analysis method was applied to the resilience assessment research. It was found that high vulnerability, high resilience provinces were mainly distributed in the eastern coastal areas, high vulnerability, low resilience provinces were mainly concentrated around the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, low vulnerability, high resilience provinces were mainly distributed in the western region, and low vulnerability, low resilience provinces were mainly in the southwest region. From 2012 to 2018, the relative flood vulnerability was “declining” in 36% of the provinces, even though they had been under pressure from rising GDP and population densities. It was also found that the annual precipitation as the driving factor had a significant impact on provincial flood vulnerabilities. The relative flood resilience from 2012 to 2018 was “rising-declining” in 39% of the provinces, had “almost no change” in 29%, and was rising in only 11%, which indicated that the relative flood resilience in many Chinese provinces still needs to be improved, with the recovery capacity of the power infrastructure in particular needing to be strengthened. Based on the spatiotemporal relative flood vulnerability and resilience variations in each province, some flood prevention and mitigation suggestions are given.