An assessment of earthquake vulnerability by multi-criteria decision-making method

Abstract

Background: Earthquake is one of the most destructive catastrophes in Bangladesh and the evaluation of vulnerability is a prerequisite for the earthquake risk estimation. As a result, determining vulnerability is essential for lowering the future fatalities. The fundamental challenge in estimating the seismic vulnerability is to have a systematic understanding of all potential earthquake related losses. With this objective, the current study deals with evaluating the seismic vulnerability of Sylhet district of Bangladesh.
Method: A multi-criteria decision-making approach such as the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) has been used in this study to estimate the earthquake vulnerability. For the assessment of three scenarios namely social, structural, and physical distance vulnerabilities, several criteria have been chosen in order to fully identify the risk of earthquake.
Findings: The study uncovers the vulnerable areas of Sylhet district. It is revealed that in terms of social vulner- ability, 9% area of Sylhet district is under very high, 55% high, 15% moderate, 17% low, and 4% is under very low vulnerable zone. Structural vulnerability represents that 9% of the district area is under the very high vulnerability category, 48% high, 31% moderate, 4% low, and 8% falls under the very low category zone, whereas physical distance vulnerability comes up with a result that 23%, 38%, 23%, 7%, and 9% of the total area fall into very high, high, moderate, low, and very low categories, respectively.
Interpretation: The current work on seismic vulnerability assessment might be useful in reducing the risk and minimizing the losses due to earthquake.

Keywords

Earthquake / Vulnerability / Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) / Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) / Geographic information system (GIS)

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