Abstract
The seismic resilience of water supply systems can be impacted by numerous factors, but what these factors are in the rural context of China is unknown. In this study, 41 potential influencing factors of seismic-resilience for rural water supply system (RWSS) were obtained through a literature review and semi-structured expert interview, comprising 26 general influencing factors (GFs) and 15 water supply safety influencing factors (SFs). This study verified and ranked these factors through a questionnaire survey delivered to RWSS stakeholders in Sichuan Province, China. Based on 123 valid, returned questionnaires, these factors are divided into 9 factor groups through factor analysis performed on GFs and SFs, respectively, of which “economic resilience” and “organizational resilience in disaster prevention stage” are shown to be the most important factor groups. Additionally, it found that the experience of earthquake events significantly affects the perceptions of stakeholders on the importance of certain factors. Specifically, stakeholders who have experienced an earthquake prioritize the post-earthquake resilience of the system, while those who have not experienced an earthquake prioritize the absorption capacity of the system in the disaster prevention stage. Thus, it is not appropriate to use fixed weights to evaluate the seismic resilience of RWSSs. Significantly, this outcome differs from existing findings on the resilience of Urban Water Supply Systems (UWSSs), where “technical resilience” is the key dimension. These findings can help decision-makers fully understand the factors affecting the seismic resilience of RWSSs in China, and in doing so, augment the strengthening of rural water supply.
Highlights
Access to safe drinking water is essential to human health and wellbeing
As this study aims to investigate the importance of factors affecting the seismic-resilience of rural water supply system (RWSS) and the latent relationships among them, the first step is to collect the potential influencing factors of RWSSs through literature review, which is a common method in factor studies [1, 7, 37–39, 42, 54]
In order to improve the reliability of RWSSs, it is necessary to clearly understand the factors influencing the seismic resilience of RWSSs
Summary
Access to safe drinking water is essential to human health and wellbeing. In China, as the government continues to increase investment in the construction of Rural Water Supply Systems (RWSSs; Figure 1), the proportion of the rural population with access to clean drinking water has risen from 68.7 to 86% over just 4 years, from 2016 to 2019. The existence of a water supply system (WSS) in the rural areas does not guarantee that people living there have access to a sustainable and reliable supply of clean drinking water over the long term [1]. In China, the majority of earthquakes occur in rural areas [3]. Earthquakes in China are frequent and destructive, resulting in serious damage to local WSSs and leaving large numbers of people without water supply (see Table 1)
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