Assessment and clustering of temporal disaster risk: Two case studies of China

Abstract

Disaster risk assessment is the foundation to carry out a comprehensive disaster reduction. Despite a growing body of literature on this subject, dynamic risk assessment concerning the temporal characteristic of disaster risk receives relatively inadequate attention in previous research. This paper focuses on analyzing the temporal disaster risk over a period to enable decision makers to understand the risk variation explicitly and hence take long-term countermeasures for improving the prevention and mitigation of hazards. It is achieved by firstly evaluating the risk temporally and then aggregating the alternatives through a hybrid clustering method based on the similarity between risk vectors. The proposed method is employed to two case studies of China concerning public health events and natural disasters respectively. The risk variation disclosed brings insight into the properties of investigated alternatives and therefore contributes to effective disaster reduction.