Spatially resolved risk assessment of Natech in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

Abstract

China is not only a large industrial country but also one of the countries with severe natural disasters in the world. The impact of a technical accident triggered by natural disasters (Natech) cannot be ignored. In Natech risk assessment, most research focuses on the quantitative analysis of Natech risk in small-scale level areas, such as parks or enterprises; Natech risk assessment in large-scale areas is typically at low resolution. There is a lack of systematic and high-resolution assessments on a large regional scale. In this paper, a grid Natech risk assessment method that couples the probability model and the information diffusion method is proposed. We select the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) as the research area to assess its Natech risks triggered by floods, earthquakes and typhoons with a spatial resolution of 1 km × 1 km. The results show that the atmospheric risk level is higher than the water environment risk level, but their distribution trends are roughly similar. For the Natech risk triggered by floods, the high-risk areas of the atmosphere and water accounted for 3.83% and 1.73% of the YREB respectively, and were distributed along with the river network. For the Natech risk triggered by earthquakes, the high-risk areas of the atmosphere and water accounted for 0.47% and 0.08% of the YREB, respectively, and high-risk areas were mostly concentrated in north-central Sichuan and northern Yunnan. For the Natech risk triggered by typhoons, the high-risk areas of the atmosphere and water accounted for 3.52% and 2.68% of the YREB respectively, which were mostly concentrated in parts of Jiangxi and south-eastern Hunan. The spatially resolved map can help to identify the spatial characteristics and hot spots, which can provide a scientific reference for macro decision-making in environmental risk management.