Landslide-oriented disaster resilience evaluation in mountainous cities: A case study in Chongqing, China

Abstract

Natural and human-made disasters are threatening cities around the world. The resilience of cities plays a critical role in disaster risk response and post-disaster recovery. In mountainous cities, landslides are among the most frequent and destructive hazards. This study presents a novel methodological framework for assessing the spatial resilience of mountainous cities specifically against landslides. Focusing on Chongqing in the Three Gorges Reservoir region, this study conceptually divides the disaster resilience of mountain cities to landslides into two dimensions: environmental resilience and social resilience. This study developed a comprehensive database by compiling data from 4,464 historical landslide events, incorporating 17 environmental resilience indicators and 16 social resilience indicators. Random forest (RF) model was employed to evaluate environmental resilience, achieving a high AUC of 0.968 and an accuracy of 97.1 %. Social resilience was assessed by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and comprehensive resilience was ranked by the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Key findings include: (1) Establishing a multi-dimensional resilience indicator system that effectively assesses landslide-oriented resilience in mountainous cities. (2) Comprehensive resilience in mountainous cities exhibit distinct spatial clustering patterns. Regions with lower environmental resilience are mainly characterized by high rainfall and complex terrain. higher social resilience concentrated in city centers, while peripheral regions face challenges due to weaker economies and inadequate healthcare infrastructure. (3) In the future development of mountain cities, comprehensive and sustainable strategies should be adopted to balance the relationship between environmental resilience and social resilience. This study provides a robust framework for disaster prevention and resilience assessment in mountainous cities, which can be applied to evaluate the disaster resistance capabilities of other mountainous cities.

Keywords

Landslides / Resilience cities / Machine learning / Mountainous cities

Relevance to resilience

This paper introduces a framework specifically designed for evaluating landslide-oriented disaster resilience in mountainous cities, making significant contributions to expanding the field of resilience research. The methodological framework proposed here, along with empirical findings from Chongqing, serves as a blueprint for other mountainous regions confronting comparable challenges. By integrating disaster factors, vulnerable environments, and capacity considerations, this framework provides a comprehensive and practical approach to developing resilient cities capable of mitigating and adapting to the impacts of natural disasters.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Junhao Huang: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Haijia Wen: Investigation, Funding acquisition. Zhuohang Li: Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Software, Resources. Yalan Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Validation, Supervision, Software, Resources, Project administration, Methodology.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our appreciation to the Chongqing Meteorological Administration for their contribution of crucial meteorological data. We are also grateful to the Chongqing Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources for providing valuable research data on historical landslides. The funding for this research was provided by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFC3007204).

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