The assessment of regional vulnerability to natural hazards in China

This paper presents a new method for quantifying the regional vulnerability to natural hazards in China. Because the traditional methods for vulnerability assessment are sensitive to weight set for sub-indices. As a result, the analytic results are less convincing, so a data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based model for the assessment of the regional vulnerability to natural disasters is presented here to improve upon the traditional methods. Under the framework of the regional natural hazards system, this paper constructs an input-output DEA model, using the efficiency calculated by the DEA to imitate the regional vulnerability to natural hazards. The result shows that, the overall level of vulnerability to natural disasters of our country is high, and the geographical pattern of vulnerability is western>Central>Eastern. There is a negative correlation between the level of regional vulnerability and regional economic level.