Improving natural disaster resilience is one of the important methods for coping with climate change and natural disasters, and quantitative evaluation of natural disaster resilience is the primary problem to be solved urgently. In this paper, an index system for evaluating regional flood disaster resilience is constructed based on a review of the literature regarding natural disaster resilience and with full consideration of the five dimensions (i.e., nature, society, economy, technology and management) which have a great influence on flood disaster resilience. Subsequently, the overall level and five dimensions of flood disaster resilience in the Chaohu Lake Basin can be evaluated quantitatively by adopting analytic network process to dynamically analyze the influencing relationships of factors. The results obtained in this research indicate that: (1) overall, the majority of the Chaohu Lake Basin exhibits intermediate to high flood disaster resilience, but there are distinct variations within the basin. The resilience is clearly influenced by the natural dimension indexes, the highest resilience levels are mainly located in the hilly, mountainous regions, and the lowest resilience levels mainly occur in the south-southeast plain of the Chaohu Lake Basin and the river estuary of the Chaohu Lake. Considering the administrative regions, the regions with the greatest areas of intermediate and high resilience are Hefei Municipal District, Chaohu City, Feidong County, Feixi County, Lujiang County, Hanshan County, Shucheng County, most parts of He County, Wuwei County and Jiujiang District of Wuhu City. (2) Preliminary validation indicates that evaluation results regarding flood disaster resilience in the Chaohu Lake Basin are consistent with the actual conditions. Therefore, the evaluation results and method can provide a valuable approach to the rapid diagnosis of weak links in the construction of flood disaster resilience infrastructure and will ultimately improve the level of flood disaster resilience in the Chaohu Lake Basin.
Sun, HH; Cheng, XF; Dai, MQ
Regional flood disaster resilience evaluation based on analytic network process: a case study of the Chaohu Lake Basin, Anhui Province, China
Natural Hazards