Assessment of urban disaster social vulnerability from the perspective of heterogeneity: a case study of Beijing

Abstract

In the context of rapid urbanization and extreme weather, assessing the level of regional vulnerability and identifying the types of regional vulnerability is an important part of China’s disaster prevention and mitigation enterprise. This study starts from the idea of social vulnerability research, considers the disturbance characteristics of urban multi-hazards, the multi-dimensional attributes of urban social vulnerability, and the limitations of the existing quantitative assessments. Meanings based on the perspective of spatial heterogeneity, this study integrates the theory of vulnerability research into urban geography research, focuses on urban disaster prevention, and mitigation and public safety. This study tries to construct an assessment idea and method that can show the spatial difference pattern of urban social vulnerability from the research perspective of combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis and conduct empirical research using Beijing as an example. The results show that, 1) the method is able to demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity pattern of the social vulnerability traits of urban hazards, which can serve as a useful supplement to the traditional vulnerability index assessment methods; 2) Beijing’s disaster social vulnerability can be categorized into five types: weak infrastructure vulnerability, mobile population agglomeration vulnerability, ecological environment risk vulnerability, demographic decline vulnerability, and spatial development agglomeration vulnerability. In terms of geographic spatial extent, the weak infrastructure vulnerability type has the largest spatial scope, accounting for about half of the total area of the region, while the demographic decline vulnerability type and the spatial development agglomeration type have a relatively small geographic distribution; 3) the core problems of urban disaster social vulnerability faced by Beijing are the large-scale mobile population and the uneven urban development and construction, and the problems of intra-regional population development and ecological environment vulnerability should not be neglected.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

urban disasters / social vulnerability / spatial heterogeneity / spatial clustering

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