PROGRESS IN GEOGRAPHY ›› 2017, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (11): 1380-1390.doi: 10.18306/dlkxjz.2017.11.007

• Orginal Article • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Social vulnerable degree of floods and its influencing factors based on the perspective of rural households: A case study of four riverside villages in Ankang City

Yu SHI(), Enpu MA, Tongsheng LI*(), Yang RUI   

  1. College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Northwest University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710127, China
  • Online:2017-12-07 Published:2017-12-07
  • Contact: Tongsheng LI E-mail:shyusherry@163.com;leetang@nwu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    Northwest University Graduate Innovation Project, No.YZZ15014;National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.41601174

Abstract:

Reducing social vulnerability to floods is an important way to alleviate the social impact of flood disasters and to improve flood resilience. This article constructs an evaluation index system for social vulnerability to floods with regard to sensitivity, adaptability, and exposure based on a micro-scale analysis. Taking four riverside villages in Ankang City as an example, we adopted the integrated index weighted by entropy method to evaluate rural households' social vulnerability to floods. Then we clarify the importance of the relationship between evaluation index and social vulnerability by BP neural network method, and identify the major influencing factors of flood vulnerability. Accordingly, countermeasures and suggestions are put forward as a practical basis for reducing the rural households' social vulnerability to floods. The main results of this research are as follows. (1) Half of the households (715) in the case study villages showed a high level of social vulnerability. (2) The difference in social vulnerability is mainly a result of eight factors, including health status of the respondents, information channel on flood prevention, evacuation method, building quality, sick or disabled person in a household, household income diversification, proportion of children under the age of 5, and proportion of older people over 60 years of age. (3) Social vulnerability evaluation based on the perspective of rural households can accurately identify vulnerable farmers and analyze the influencing factors, which have more realistic significance for reducing the social vulnerability to floods of rural households.

Key words: rural households' perspective, floods, vulnerability evaluation, influencing factors, riverside village in Ankang City