Brief communication: Composite urban resilience to typhoon disasters – an assessment of 27 cities in seven major river basins, China

Abstract

Accompanying climate change, typhoon disasters have been occurring globally with high frequency and intensity, causing huge property damages and losses of life. To strengthen disaster resilience is a vital policy target in contemporary China, but few studies compare urban resilience to typhoon in different watersheds. To fill this gap, we construct a composite model by an indicator-based system, and adopt the fussy-entropy TOPSIS method to assess urban resilience in China’s seven major river basins. The results show that the Hai River and the provincial capitals had a higher resilience score than others, while cities of the Pearl River Basin are relatively weaker. Albeit with weak economic level, however, the scoring value of urban resilience in some regions was partially higher partly attributing to the support of government investment, local infrastructure, water conservancy projects, and the city planning. This research may benefit river basin of different conditions to enhance urban disaster resilience, and provides a realistic reference in response to typhoon threats.